Illustrated Architecture Dictionary

Octagon House


A Victorian house having eight sides; esp. found in the Hudson Valley of New York

Excerpts from
A Field Guide to American Houses, by Virginia & Lee McAlester. New York: Knopf, 2000. p. 235

The Octagon house is easily recognized by the eight-sided shape of the exterior walls. Occasional examples show six-, ten-, twelve-, or sixteen-sided forms; a few are round.

This is a very rare style; probably only a few thousand were originally built, mostly in New York, Massachusetts, and the Midwest. Several hundred of these survive; most were built in the decades of the 1850s and '60s.

The style owed its popularity to Orson S. Fowler (1809-1887), a lecturer and writer from Fishkill, New York, who in 1849 published an elaborate defense of its virtues entitled The Octagon House, A Home for All. Following Fowler, at least seven other pattern books of the 18 50s also illustrated Octagon houses.

Fowler stressed that an octagon encloses more floor space per linear foot of exterior wall than does the usual square or rectangle, thereby "reducing both building costs and heat loss through the walls." He also maintained that Octagons were superior to square houses in "increasing sunlight and ventilation" and in "eliminating dark and useless corners." However, he conveniently ignored interior room shapes, which were not octagonal and therefore still had "useless" corners, including triangular spaces not found in conventional shapes. Furthermore, much of this "increased sunlight and ventilation" went into pantries and closets; most rooms, in fact, have only a single exposure rather than the two commonly found in conventional houses. Such practical problems are undoubtedly responsible for the only modest success of the Octagon movement.

Fowler also advocated other improvements such as indoor plumbing, central heating, "board walls" made of lumber scraps and "gravel walls" of poured concrete. He was not generally concerned with decorative treatment beyond "the beauty of the octagon form itself," although many Octagons were built with decorative detailing.

Fowler claimed his do mestic use of the Octagon to be original but there were scattered earlier examples including Thomas Jefferson's summer house, Poplar Forest, completed in 1819. Octagonal wings and projections were also common in Adam houses (1780-1820).

An Excerpt from
Genesee Country Village, by Stuart Bolger, 1993

Orson S. Fowler, a native ol the Genesee Country village of Cohocton, left his father's farm to study for the ministry at Amherst College. While at Amherst his interest switched to phrenology - thats cience which maintains that character and mental capacity can be analyzed by examination of the conformation of a subject's skull. With his brother and sister, Fowler published tracts extolling phrenology and clairvoyance and a diet of vegetables while warning against coffee, tea, spirits, and tightly laced dresses.

Then in 1848 Fowler published A Home for All, or a New, Cheap, Convenient, and Superior Mode of Building in which he announced that the octagon house with its eight sides enclosed more space than a square one with equal wall space.

"Why," asked Orson Fowler," so little progress in architecture when there is so much in other matters! Why continue to build in the same square form of all past ages?"

The octagonal form had been used in public buildings in the past [e.g., the Roman Tower of Winds in Athens, Greece]; but now as a concept for domestic architecture it had a dedicated and convincing champion. Fowler's books, stressingt he functional and stylistic advantages of the octagon house, found many readers and several hundred followers who sprinkled the landscape from New England to Wisconsin with eight-sided houses, barns, churches, schoolhouses, carriage houses, gardenhouses, smokehouses, and privies.

The Gothic Revival and the Italianate expressions had not been lost upon Orson Fowler. From the Italianate he borrowed the cupolas which lighted his stairwells, the bracketed roofs, and the verandas. From the Gothic came the pointed arch windows and other embellishments in the octagon house he built for himself on a rise overlooking the HudsonRiver.

From various sources, including his own innovative imagination, came indoor water closets,s peaking tubes, dumb waiters, hot air furnaces, hotwater heaters, and ventilators. The moment of The Home For All was brief, although the novelty of theeight-sided building has never lost its appeal to those individuals looking for something out of the ordinary.

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Photos and their arrangement © 2002 Chuck LaChiusa
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