west winds house

The West Winds House, a project by UK architecture firm Kirkland Fraser Moor, “explores the relationships between external and internal spaces and passive solar gain” -

iron age round houses

The archaeological site at Jarlshof, in the Shetland Isles, includes remains of  Iron Age round houses that date from between 200 BC and 800 AD -

les pigeonniers ronds

Icons of nobility, the massive, circular dovecotes of northern France housed pigeons rather than people -

Until the French Revolution stripped the aristocracy of its traditional privileges, only members of the nobility were allowed to keep pigeons.  “To house the birds, magnificent castle tower-like structures were constructed. From the 13th century until the 1789 French Revolution, ten [of] thousands of these pigeonries existed in Northern France, yet today only a few hundred remain. After the French Revolution, many ‘pigeonniers’ were destroyed as symbols of the feudal past.”

Those that escaped destruction still dot the French countryside — large, imposing, nearly windowless towers whose interiors are filled with hundreds of small niches.

a surreal folie

The Broken Column house was built in about 1780 by aristocrat François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville, who lived there until the French Revolution -

Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France, visited the house, taking notes for the construction of her own folie at Versailles.

Thomas Jefferson, who visited the house while he was Minister to France, was said to have been particularly taken by it. “How grand the idea excited by the remains of such a column!” Jefferson wrote to Maria Cosway, the painter with whom he visited the house.

radius house

Closer to a half-circle than a circle, the Radius House, built in 1958, was designed by architect Daniel J. Liebermann.  An apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West, Liebermann was only 28 years old when he built the house for himself and his wife.

The house was built of salvaged brick, exposed beams of Douglas fir reclaimed from a bridge in Ukiah, and skylights obtained from WWII bombers. A 2010 renovation led by Vivian Dwyer of Dwyer Design opened up the interior, updated the wiring and appliances, and added modern elements.

the big house

The Presidio Model, or model prison, was a round, panopticon-style penitentiary on the Isla de la Juventud in Cuba -

Built between 1926 and 1928, it was closed in 1967 and now serves as a museum.

Jeremy Bentham, the 18th century British philosopher who proposed the panopticon concept, described its design as follows: “A building circular… The prisoners in their cells, occupying the circumference — The officers in the centre. By blinds and other contrivances, the Inspectors concealed … from the observation of the prisoners: hence the sentiment of a sort of omnipresence — The whole circuit reviewable with little, or … without any, change of place. One station in the inspection part affording the most perfect view of every cell.“

a 1940s housing bubble

Wallace Neff, a Southern California architect who made Spanish-style mansions for Hollywood stars in the ’30s and ’40s, also tried his hand at designing innovative, low-cost housing for the poor.  His Airform houses, often called bubble houses, were inexpensive and easy to build -

Meant to remedy 1940s housing shortages, the houses never caught on in the United States.  Only a few hundred of them were built here, rather than the thousands that Neff expected, and nearly all have since been torn down.