Apr 1, 2023 · The octagon house; a home for all ... The octagon house; a home for all by Fowler, O. S. (Orson Squire), 1809-1887. Publication date 1973 Topics Architecture, Domestic, Buildings, Octagonal Publisher New York, Dover Publications …

Orson Squire Fowler (October 11, 1809 – August 18, 1887) was an American phrenologist and lecturer. He also popularized the octagon house in the middle of the nineteenth century.

After Fowler published his first edition of The Octagon House, he discovered something even better: An octagon house with a gravel wall. “Gravel” combined lime, stone and sand for a strong, cheap, vermin-proof outer wall.

In the middle of the 19th century, Fowler made his mark on American architecture when he touted the advantages of octagonal homes over rectangular and square structures in his widely publicized book, The Octagon House: A Home For All, or A New, Cheap, Convenient, and Superior Mode of Building, printed in the year 1848. [2]

Fowler's Folly, built during 1848–1853, was the octagonal home of Orson S. Fowler in Fishkill, New York. It was a "monumental" house for its time, with four stories and 60 rooms. [ 1 ] The house was condemned as a public health hazard and dynamited in 1897.

Mar 10, 2021 · To illustrate and justify the technical and ideological proposals that the book outlined, Fowler built a magnificent octagonal house for his family in Fishkill, New York. The house had four floors and sixty rooms and forty other miscellaneous rooms and closets.

Mar 22, 2019 · In the 1850s, leading phrenologist Orson S. Fowler turned the same attention he’d given to analyzing the measurements of the human skull to analyzing the shape of the American house. He imagined a more fluid form would be more efficient.

Aug 11, 2023 · “The Octagon House” — which is available free online — is where Fowler consolidated and illustrated his lust for eight-sided polygons. In it, he describes octagonal construction as “far...

Although the octagon shape had been used in the past—notably in such buildings as the Baptistry in Florence and the Chapter Houses of York and Westminster —it had seldom been applied to domestic architecture. Here Orson Fowler became a true innovator, revealing to a world

He was the foremost proponent of phrenology in the United States when that pseudo-science was all the rage; he was the creator of the architectural design of octagon houses, a form which spread across the nation; and then he was the author …