A gazebo is a pavilion structure, sometimes octagonal, that may be built, in parks, gardens, and spacious public areas.
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Gazebos are freestanding or attached to a garden wall, roofed, and open on all sides; they provide shade, shelter, ornamental features in a landscape, and a place to rest. Some gazebos in public parks are large enough to serve as bandstands or rain shelters.
Gazebos include pagodas, pavilions, kiosks, belvederes, follies, alambras, pergolas, and rotundas. Such structures are popular in warm and sunny climates. They are in the literature of China, Persia, and many other classical civilizations, going back to several millennia. Examples of such structures are the garden houses at Montacute House in Somerset, England. The gazebo at Elton on the Hill in Nottinghamshire, thought to date from the late 18th or early 19th century, is a square battlemented tower like a fort, part of an extensive system of red-brick walled gardens.[1]
The word origin is unknown and has no cognates in other European languages. False etymologies are proposed, such as the French Que c'est beau ("How beautiful") and the Macaronic Latin gazebo ("I shall gaze"). L.L. Bacon proposed a derivation from Casbah, a Muslim quarter around the citadel in Algiers.[2] W. Sayers proposed Hispano-Arabic qushaybah, in a poem by Cordoban poet Ibn Quzman (d. 1160).[3]
The word gazebo was used by British architects John and William Halfpenny in their book Rural Architecture in the Chinese Taste (1750). Plate 55 of the book “Elevation of a Chinese Gazebo” shows “a Chinese Tower or Gazebo, situated on a Rock, and raised to a considerable Height, and a Gallery round it to render the Prospect more complete”.
George Washington had a small eight-sided garden structure at Mount Vernon. Thomas Jefferson wrote about gazebos - called summerhouses or pavilions.
In contemporary England and North America gazebos are typically built of wood and covered with standard roofing materials, such as shingles. Gazebos can be tent-style structures of poles covered by tensioned fabric. Gazebos may have screens to aid in the exclusion of flying insects.
Temporary gazebos are often set up in the campsites of music festivals in the United Kingdom and North America, usually accompanying tents around it.