Designers, architects, inventers and imaginative homeowners are always looking for new shapes for houses. We have seen sod dwellings dug into the prairie, igloos, Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House, yurts, Frank Gehry’s titanium explosions, geodesic domes – someone is always trying to get away from square and rectangular shapes for our living spaces. Sometimes they work. Often, as in Fuller’s case, they are oddities that prove unlivable.
The octagon was such an innovation in American domestic architecture. The eight-sided house shape was most famously championed by Orson Fowler, who published The Octagonal Mode in 1848 and then its follow-up, The Octagon House: A Home For All, or A New, Cheap, Convenient, and Superior Mode of Building. Fowler, a persuasive lecturer, inspirational speaker and phrenologist (the ‘science’ of defining an individual’s characteristics by the contours of the skull) said that this house style was easy to build and more functional than conventional houses. Any man could build a house for himself, Fowler said, by driving a stake into the ground, trying a string to it and drawing a circle. He would then square it off twice and erect a foundation on the resulting eight straight sides. The facts of building are, of course, far more complicated, but Fowler was nothing if not persuasive.
A circle is a most efficient shape, but difficult to build and awkward to furnish, so an octagon is a sensible approximation. Victorian builders were used to building 135-degree corners, as in the typical bay window, and could easily adapt to an octagonal plan.
The octagon house, which Fowler promoted as the ultimate home for the middle class, was often encircled with a porch, topped with an eight-sided cupola, had a low-pitched roof and, occasionally, a raised basement. Fowler advocated constructing from concrete, though brick and wood framing were often used. The style reached its apex between 1850 and 1870, when several thousand octagons were built, especially in New York’s Hudson River Valley, but also in New England, the Midwest and nearby parts of Canada.
Sometimes, especially in warmer climates, the porches served as the access to upstairs rooms, much like the verandahs of early French houses in the Mississippi Delta. This was driven, in part, by the building’s circular orientation, which meant that a staircase was either a central air shaft or awkwardly placed. The house’s basic shape also made for rooms with odd angles; while central rooms tended to be square and generously proportioned, exterior rooms were often triangles. By the 1870s, the octagon was no longer fashionable.
Besides showing limits as a designer, Fowler displayed ignorance of building history: he was apparently unaware that the Romans had used concrete in their buildings, or that Thomas Jefferson had built an octagonal house when, in 1806, he began construction of Poplar Forest, his retreat in Lynchburg, Virginia.
Other famous octagons survive. The McElroy Octagon House, also known as the Colonial Dames Octagon House, is a museum house open to the public in San Francisco. In Natchez, Mississippi is Longwood, the largest octagonal house in the United States. Designed in 1859, it was being built by enslaved people when, in 1861, the Civil War halted construction. Longwood is famous for the contrast between its ornately finished first floor and the unfinished upper floors; of the 32 rooms planned for the house, only nine rooms on the basement floor were completed. It, too, is a house museum. Another large, ornate octagon is a private home, the Armour–Stiner House in Irvington, New York, the only known fully domed octagonal residence.
Octagons still exist, especially in the older neighborhoods of the northeast. But they are all vestiges of a discredited fad that we have discarded, much like Orson Fowler’s phrenology theories.