The Aviary: Lynchburg's Eighteen-Sided Folly

Most buildings come in four sides, maybe six. The structure you are near has many more. Built around the turn of the twentieth century, the building now known as The Aviary is said to have been a gift from Randolph Guggenheimer.

Its unusual polygonal shape was not purely decorative: the original purpose is said to have been to house birds, the kind of private menagerie that wealthy benefactors of the era sometimes donated to their cities as public attractions. The avian residents are long gone, but the building survived intact. Few structures from that period combine such deliberate architectural originality with a genuinely peculiar origin story.

In a city full of nineteenth-century brick and iron, this many-sided curiosity stands as evidence that Lynchburg once had a patron willing to build something nobody had seen before.