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May 30, 2005
The Burnt Over District at its finest . . . Phrenology!
Phrenology is back! This is a story from Geneva's immediately neighboring village, Waterloo, NY, home of Memorial Day. Really. They claim to have invented it there.
Further: Sorry - I had to run upstairs to the balcony to watch the Memorial Day parade and ceremony - I live across the street from where they set up the speakers' platform every year. Geneva, in the best Burnt Over District fashion, has an octagon house. Here's a view of the house, here's an index of the octagonal, hexagonal, and round houses in New York State. The man who popularize octagonal houses was also a leading phrenologist, Orson Squire Fowler. He's an excellent 19th century example of the all-too-common species of architectural moral prescriptivist: build this way and the world will be a better place. My favorite diagnosis of the type is from David Watkin, Morality and Architecture: The Development of a Theme in Architectural History and Theory from the Gothic Revival to the Modern Movement. Good book - well worth reading (though if you're going to buy it, buy the revised edition, Morality and Architecture Revisited).
Posted by CrankyProfessor at May 30, 2005 9:30 AM