O. S. Fowler (1809–1887)

I can't imagine building a house based solely on this book but many people did. Between 1848 when the first edition of this book was published and the Civil War, many octagon houses were built. Orson Fowler lived in his own octagon house between Route 9 and the Hudson River in Dutchess County for a relatively short time before moving to a more conventional (and cheaper) house. It was used as a boarding house and a school before being abandoned and vandalized. It is a testament to the sturdiness of the construction that local authorities finally had to dynamite the house to raze it. There is no longer any sign of the house on Fowler Road.

Fowler claimed that the octagon house was cheaper to build and healthier to live in than a four-sided house.… (mehr)

This is a reprint of the 1853 book: A Home for All, or The Gravel Wall and Octagon Mode of Building. The style was quite popular in the early to mid 1800s. The book consists chiefly of various arguments including both aesthetic and practical, for the superiority of the octagon over any other style of house. The aesthetic arguments are, as such things tend to be, somewhat humorous to later generations. People fond of the picturesque and the quaint would probably not agree with Fowler's argument that a dome is obviously more attractive than gables.

The book is well-illustrated with 19 black-and-white photographs of octagonal buildings and 32 figures, including the floor plans of a variety of houses, including several different arrangements of rooms in octagon houses.

It would be very interesting to see this re-issued with color photographs of octagon houses replacing and supplementing the original text and illustrations.… (mehr)