This Is Not My Beautiful House

Casey Dooley

This Is Not My Beautiful House is an oral history of the life, death, and rebirth of a turn-of-the-century home. Buttressed by interests in site-specific mind-body memory and architecture, as well as neurobiology and psychogeography, it pursues the curious question: Do buildings have feelings?

This work is best engaged with in its intended format, as a set of newsprint zines. Consider it your commute companion, a coffee coaster, that peculiar piece of printed matter you picked up along the way. The experience of reading off-screen (and absent a stack of 8.5″ x 11″ paper) is intentional. If you’d like to give it a read, please reach out for a copy to be sent via snail mail. Visually impaired? Get in touch for an audio file.

Casey is an oral historian, writer, and inveterate inquirer whose work is motivated by the extraordinary lives of everyday humans as well as the spaces with which they interact. 

Her work focuses on architecture, class, community, and individual experience. In listening to people share their memories of how they’ve lived and where they’ve been, she finds connection, meaning, and new ways to understand the world at large. 

When she’s not talking to strangers, Casey enjoys mudlarking, romanticizing Victorian life, delighting in sleight-of-hand magic, scouring microhistories, and being the unofficial hypewoman of the American Midwest.