A columnist in the Wisconsin State Journal described its idiosyncratic style in April 1946:

“The Zech house is absolutely round … not octagonal … and the second story is somewhat smaller in circumferance than the first so that, from the distant road, it appears to be two fine cheeses of different sizes set one on top of the other.  Inside the rooms are pie-shaped, except that the tip of each is cut off by a small round central hallway.”

“Mr. Zech built it that way, he said, simply because he liked it that way, and the idea was original with him.”

A recent photo shows it looking much the same.

According to the Prince of Petworth blog, the house, located at 1001 Irving Street, “was built in 1901 by a prominent Brookland builder, John C. Louthan, who lived in another house he himself built at 12th and Irving (now gone).” The architect, Edward Woltz, “was a very busy designer of modest houses in the city.”

“There is no information about why Woltz and Louthan chose the odd shape for their house — octagon and round houses were a short fad in the US in the 1850s but had stopped being built by the Civil War and revivals of this style are rare.”

If you haven’t flown through La Guardia Airport in recent months, you’re in for a surprise. Whether it’s a pleasant surprise or an unhappy one depends on your feelings about curvaceous, eccentric, whimsical architecture …. No other airport had anything quite like this porthole-pocked cynosure; a hometown creation by Wallace K. Harrison, the consummate New York establishment architect of the mid-20th century.

Not everyone appreciated the structure.  In reporting on its April 16, 1964 opening, the New York Times said it “looks like a new design for a giant ice cream cone.” Writing in 1980, influential architecture critic Paul Goldberger compared the tower, “with its plethora of portholes,” to “a concrete piece of Swiss cheese.”

Others, like Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas, admired it.  In “Delirious New York” (1978), Mr. Koolhaas described the dialectic in Mr. Harrison’s work “between the rectangle and the kidney shape, between rigidity and freedom.”

Ultimately, he wrote, the liberating impulse surrenders to the grid. “Only his curve remains as a fossil of the freer language.”

Located in Vierwaldstättersee, Switzerland, the house was designed by Philippe Stuebi Architekten with Eberhard Tröger.  Construction was completed in 2007.

The curved interior has round skylights -

Located in Atlanta’s wealthy Buckhead neighborhood, the house was falling apart when Theodore and Susan Pound bought it in 2005.  They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars restoring it, relying, in part, on blueprints and advice from the original architect.

“You seem so normal to us, you don’t seem like a contrarian,” Mr. Pound told [Cecil Alexander] recently. “But this house is such a basically nonconformist idea. It’s still something of a mystery to me: why is it round?”

Mr. Alexander, a jovial raconteur with a razor-sharp memory, has an explanation for everything. “My first plans were L’s or squares or rectangles,” he told the Pounds. “But then I realized those shapes waste so much space — a circle is compact, it gives you the maximum interior room for the minimum amount of exposed wall.”

The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in March 2010.

Designed by architect Wallace K. Harrison in the 1930s, the Harrison Estate served as a laboratory for Harrison’s architectural ideas. “The home’s signature element, the circle, is found in the forms of the living room, small former dining room, pool, and even concrete pavers used for walkways . . . . Amongst the many artists and friends whom enjoyed the house were Alexander Calder, Marc Chagall, Mary Callery, Robert Moses, and Le Corbusier.”

“He builds landmarks,” Time Magazine said of Harrison in 1952.

His Long Island house was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.

The materials include spruce, willow and poplar trees; the tools include billhooks, kukris, axes and a cell phone.