These days, hoteliers take a dim view of guests who smash up their rooms. But in 1850, as Orson Fowler travelled through Milton, Wisconsin, he stayed at the newly built Milton House inn, whose proprietor delighted in inviting guests to take a sledgehammer to the walls for 6 cents a swing. Intrigued, Fowler hefted a hammer and swung hard. It bounced harmlessly off the wall. The inn, it turned out, was built of concrete. This, Fowler decided, was the perfect material for the prototype house of the future that he was building back home: to his mind, modern housing should be both cheap and indestructible. The most important of all, however, was a home鈥檚 shape. For Fowler, only one shape guaranteed a better way of living 鈥� the octagon.
ORSON FOWLER had curious credentials for an architectural visionary: namely, he had no training whatsoever. In the 1840s, Fowler was the man who brought the 鈥渟cience鈥� of phrenology to the American masses. Phrenologists believed that the lumps and bumps on the skull reflected the development 鈥� or otherwise 鈥� of parts of the brain responsible for particular abilities and personality traits. 鈥淭he skull yields and shrinks in accordance with the increase and diminution of the brain within,鈥� explained Fowler. With a skull reading and a suitable course of self-improvement, patients could remould their heads by addressing their weaknesses and building on their strengths.
From his headquarters in Manhattan, Fowler published innumerable books and newspapers denouncing such evils as tight corsets, tobacco and corporal punishment, and advocating free love and vegetarianism 鈥� all to get your head in shape. By 1848, tens of thousands of subscribers were primed for the latest round of self-improving reforms, yet none would have guessed what was to come.
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If the housing of our minds could be reformed, Fowler reasoned, why not also reform the housing of our bodies? Having recently bought himself a tract of land in Fishkill, New York, the question was not an idle one for Fowler. He needed a new house, but the fashion for Greek Revival homes struck him as stuffy, unhealthy and suitable only for a 鈥済ranny鈥檚 tea-intoxicated nerves鈥�.
鈥淚n looking about for some general plan, I said to myself, 鈥榃hy not take our pattern from NATURE? Her forms are mostly SPHERICAL鈥�,鈥� he wrote in his book A Home for All. 鈥淪he has ten thousand globular or cylindrical forms to one square one鈥� Why not, then, adopt this spherical form for houses?鈥� Octagons, he argued, were the roundest practicable design for most builders. He produced pages of calculations showing that octagons enclosed a larger area than a square or a rectangle with the same length of wall, while presenting more frontage to health-giving sunlight.
Fowler was hardly the first to discover the octagon鈥檚 curious charm. According to legend, Jan de Groot鈥檚 house, which once stood at the northernmost tip of Scotland, had eight sides, eight doors and an eight-sided table, supposedly to avoid claims of favouritism by members of the quarrelsome family who lived there. More practically, Christie鈥檚 London auction house featured an octagonal room to avoid the shadows and awkward viewing of right-angled galleries. In the US, Thomas Jefferson had been so delighted with the shape that he even designed octagonal privies on his estate.
But eight-sided homes were rare, and so Fowler trumpeted the novel construction of his futuristic home: 鈥淭his is no fancy theory, but an EXPERIMENTAL REALITY.鈥� He crammed in an astonishing number of innovations. He used glass wherever possible, and eschewed fireplaces for a wood-burning central heating system in the basement. French doors and verandas wrapped around every floor, and a central glass cupola let in both light and cross-breezes. Radically, the kitchen moved out of the servants鈥� realm to become part of the family home. Odd corners formed by the octagon were enclosed to create built-in cupboards, then a novelty. Folding internal walls allowed entire floors to be rearranged. Most daringly, Fowler declared the end of the privy: his design featured indoor bathrooms with cisterns to provide hot and cold running water, as well as flushing toilets.
When A Home For All appeared in 1848, it promised 鈥淎 house better than the castles of princes, in every respect! Every way calculated for an earthly paradise!鈥� By now work on Fowler鈥檚 own octagonal castle was well under way. Then, while Fowler was away promoting the book, he sent word to stop work. During his stay in Milton, Wisconsin, he had discovered a wondrous new building material that would improve his earthly paradise still further 鈥� what he called 鈥済rout鈥�, a crude early form of concrete. By the time the second edition of his book came out, the concrete octagon that the people of Fishkill called Fowler鈥檚 Folly was finished.
When fellow reformers such as newspaperman and politician Horace Greeley, and Amelia Bloomer 鈥� of bloomers fame 鈥� came to admire his four-storey Xanadu and wander round its 60 rooms, they found it boasted everything from a gymnasium to a 鈥減rophet鈥檚 room鈥� on the top floor. Thanks to the folding walls, the dining room could expand to seat 100 guests. With its concrete-and-glass construction, large open spaces, indoor plumbing and central heating, Fowler could gaze out from his prophet鈥檚 room, knowing he really had built the home of the future.
The public agreed. In the 1850s, Fowler鈥檚 floor plans were widely reproduced, and octagons sprang up across the country. Nicknamed 鈥渂andbox鈥� or 鈥渋nkwell鈥� homes, about in the second half of the 19th century, mainly in the American north-east and the Midwest. Some eminent figures cast their lot with eight-sided living: showman P. T. Barnum had an octagonal home built in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and Mark Twain鈥檚 octagonal writing retreat proved so felicitous that he wrote of the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn there.
鈥淚n the 1850s, octagonal 鈥榠nkwell鈥� homes sprang up across the country鈥�
Other octagons went decidedly pear-shaped, however. Among the innumerable schemes begun by Fowler鈥檚 followers was Octagon City, a utopian settlement in Kansas where vegetarians would live in octagonal homes built on octagonal plots. Scores of settlers were lured out to the prairie in 1858 with the promise of hydropathic spas, fine schools and concert halls. What they found was a single log cabin 鈥� and it was square. The colony quickly collapsed.
Things were scarcely better back in Fishkill. After losing money in , Fowler was forced to rent his home to boarders. But its concrete cisterns and cesspools did not prove quite as impermeable as Fowler had expected. Sewage seeped into the water supply, and the healthiest home in America turned deadly when an outbreak of typhoid killed one tenant after another.
The octagon fad itself soon grew rather sickly. While Fowler鈥檚 modern conveniences proved remarkably prescient, the octagon shape itself was nowhere near as practical as he had claimed. Furniture fit uneasily into the oddly shaped corners, while interior walls met exterior walls at eccentric angles. Many octagonal houses were later retrofitted with rectangular kitchen extensions; long-suffering Victorian wives were perhaps less enamoured with Fowler鈥檚 ingenuity than their husbands were.
Today, . Watertown, Wisconsin, and Natchez, Mississippi, boast particularly fine examples, as does Gough Street in San Francisco (pictured). Many are still lived in, though one owner recently recalled how in the 1950s the fad for roller skating saw local skaters using his circular verandas as an impromptu roller rink.
Fowler鈥檚 Folly proved less enduring. After the typhoid outbreak, the home ran through a succession of colourful owners. Cuban revolutionary Andr茅s Cassard used it in the 1860s to house a 鈥淐uban Institute and Military Academy鈥�. Later, one Emma Cunningham ran it as a boarding house, until she was misidentified as an infamous jilted lover of the same name who had stabbed her dentist beau to death with his own instruments. Her boarders fled and the house went up for sale again. By 1880, it had been abandoned, though Fowler himself was once spotted paying a surreptitious visit to his former dream home, and climbing around the structure 鈥渓ike a cat鈥�. But there was no going back. He had long been widowed and when he remarried and built a new home outside Boston, it looked just like everyone else鈥檚.
His folly passed through the hands of many an absentee owner before selling one last time for a paltry $800. Local teenagers hung out in the abandoned building, but no family wanted to live there and when the roof began to give way, the town declared it a hazard. In August 1897, the future of American housing was demolished. Fowler鈥檚 concrete walls lived up to their billing to the last: it took multiple charges of dynamite to finally undo his folly.