File:Domestic architecture of the American colonies and of the early republic (1922) (14595557739).jpg

Identifier: domesticarchite00kimb (find matches)
Title: Domestic architecture of the American colonies and of the early republic
Year: 1922 (1920s)
Authors: Kimball, Fiske, 1888-1955 New York. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Committee on Education
Subjects: Architecture, Domestic Architecture, Colonial
Publisher: New York, C. Scribner's Sons
Contributing Library: Smithsonian Libraries
Digitizing Sponsor: Smithsonian Libraries

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Text Appearing Before Image:
ills, the octagonal form was notwidely taken up for houses until 1850, when Orson Squire Fowler popularized itby his book, A Home for All, or a New, Cheap and Superior Mode of Building.2He had built himself a house on the Hudson on this model about 1844. The scheme 1 Plate 17 in vol. 2 of W. Kent, Designs of Inigo Jones (1727), a book which Jefferson owned. 2 See Fanny Hale Gardiner, The Octagon House, Country Life in America, vol. 23 (March, 1913),pp. 79-80. 176 HOUSES OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC then had an enormous following. Octagonal houses were scattered everywhere, inNew England, in the Northwest, many still with Greek detail. Even to-day fewold Michigan towns are without one or more, built in the fifties and sixties. Incruder examples the bedrooms are arranged around a central chimney, very muchlike so many pieces of pie. The logical, if not the sensible, extreme of the rotonda type is obviously a housein the form of a circle. Temples or casinos of circular form were features of the
Text Appearing After Image:
From a photograph by R. If. Holsinger Figure 137. Pavilion II, Ionic of Fortuna Virilis, University of Virginia Thomas Jefferson, 1818 English landscape gardens, and were imitated on the Continent, as in the Eng-lish Pavilion at Pillnitz. Some of these pavilions were not mere summer-houses,but had living accommodations for the owner and two or three servants. JohnPlaws Rural Architecture, published in 1794, of which Bulfinch owned an edi-tion,1 included drawings of a circular house on Lake Windermere, designed andbuilt by the author. There were few of the leading American designers who didnot at least toy with such an idea. Jefferson made a sketch as early as 1794, as a 1 E. S. Bulfinch, Charles Bulfinch, p. 83. 177 AMERICAN DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE forerunner of the Poplar Forest scheme, of a casino in circular form: a round centralroom with a colonnade encircling it part-way, the remaining segments havingtwo elliptical rooms inscribed in them.1 McComb devised a scheme closely simi-lar.

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