Don?t be a square! Welcome back to Period Dramas, a weekly column that alternates between rounding up historic homes on the market and answering questions we?ve always had about older structures.
There are a few things that the houses we profile in this space have in common: They all are old, they all have fireplaces, and they all are rectangular (or some amalgamation of rectangular boxes stacked atop or attached alongside each other). That is, until now.
In the 1850s, a phrenologist named Orson Squire Fowler (who was also a polymath of sorts) penned a treatise on homes that he hoped would shift the conversation away from the boring and overused rectangular plan of houses onto a different and more efficient shape, that of the octagon. Outlined rather humorously, whether he wanted it so or not, in the 1854 book A Home for All: Or the Gravel Wall and Octagon Mode of Building, Fowler argues that an octagon encloses approximately 20 percent more space than a square of the same perimeter, therefore rendering it a more efficient and economical shape for a house.
Fowler also proposes that the more common style of house at the time, one of a rectangle with wings off to the side (presumably used for servant quarters), is wildly inefficient and?even worse?simply unattractive. "And then, how it looks!" Fowler writes. "Wings on a house are not quite as good taste as on birds. How would a little apple or peach look stuck on each side of a large one" Yet wi...