Octagon House Architecture

An octagon house is a residential building with an eight-sided floor plan, typically topped with a flat roof and encircled by a veranda. The style was popular in the United States and Canada mostly during the 1850s, chiefly in the Midwest and East Coast and in nearby parts of Canada, though a smaller number were built into the early twentieth century. Its chief proponent was Orson Squire Fowler, whose influential 1848 book promoted the octagon plan as superior to conventional rectangular and square houses on the grounds that the shape maximizes interior floor area while minimizing exterior wall surface, which Fowler argued would lower construction costs and reduce heat loss in winter and heat gain in summer. Several thousand octagon houses were built across North America under this influence.