History of octagon windows
It would be easier to heat in the winter and (with a cupola on top) easier to vent in the summer. An eight-sided house would be cheaper to build, since its exterior walls would enclose more space than a rectangle. The form Fowler chose was the equilateral octagon. She makes ten thousand curvilineal to one square figure. In A Home for All Fowler asked: “But is the square form the best of all? Is the right angle the best angle? Can not some radical improvement be made, both in the outside form and the internal arrangement of our houses? Nature’s forms are mostly SPHERICAL.
![history of octagon windows history of octagon windows](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2AWGD3J/appendix-to-the-journals-of-the-senate-and-assembly-of-the-session-of-the-legislature-of-the-state-of-california-uilding-of-brick-on-a-cement-foundation-the-schoolhouse-has-fourrooms-and-a-hall-running-through-the-building-the-floor-of-the-hallis-cement-and-in-the-center-of-it-is-an-octagon-court-which-extends-tothe-top-of-the-luilding-in-this-octagon-court-is-the-library-which-iswell-lighted-by-the-double-glass-doors-at-each-end-of-the-hall-and-theeight-windows-at-the-top-of-the-octagon-each-classroom-has-two-entrances-from-the-hall-one-door-being-nearthe-teachers-desk-the-other-n-2AWGD3J.jpg)
His company published books and pamphlets on vegetarianism, homeopathy, water cures, hypnotism, shorthand, child rearing, women’s rights, sexual theory (“Let no sun set,” he proclaimed, “without a full, hearty, soul-inspiring love-feast”), the treatment of criminals and the insane, and was first to distribute Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. A convert to phrenology, Fowler turned from the ministry to tour the country demonstrating the new “science.” By 1842 he had founded a publishing company, Fowler and Wells, and was producing The American Phrenological Journal and Miscellany, calling himself the largest mail-order publisher in the United States. They drew the inspiration for their homes-and in many cases their plans-from a single remarkable book: A Home for All, first published in 1848 by a former theology student named Orson Squire Fowler.įowler graduated from Amherst College in 1834, the same year as his friend Henry Ward Beecher. The builders of these houses, most of them upper-middle-class men, were intensely individualistic, dogmatic, even exhibitionistic.
![history of octagon windows history of octagon windows](https://st.hzcdn.com/simgs/2211e8d507be0936_9-3167/home-design.jpg)
But in fact there are hundreds of these “unique” houses still standing, all of them testament to a vigorous, nationwide vogue that sprang up on the eve of the Civil War. And most who come across such a building believe it to be unique, the inexplicable architectural whim of a long-dead local. A GREAT MANY people have, at one time or another, happened to drive past a curious, eightsided house.