The building which we had entered was one of great size and elaborateness, labyrinthine complexity, involving curiously irregular differences in floor levels, characterized the entire arrangement. Ascent was effected over the steep, transversely ribbed stone ramps or inclined planes which everywhere served in lieu of stairs. The rooms we encountered were of all imaginable shapes and proportions, ranging from five-pointed stars to triangles and perfect cubes. The Cyclopean massiveness and giganticism of everything about us became curiously oppressive; and there was something vaguely but deeply unhuman in all the contours, dimensions, proportions, decorations, and constructional nuances of the blasphemously archaic stonework.
-Lovecraft, H.P. (1931). At the Mountains of Madness

Telling stories is an underappreciated visualization in architecture, allowing a reader to experience how a space is used from a first person view offers a glimpse into a proposal. “A Home in a Formal Town” is story about architecture, domesticity, and why this fictional town is so inciting and repulsing at the same time. A dream world where lives are lived differently but not that different from our own, an underpinning of social norms with a pinch of schizophrenia is the realm of which this town exists. Directors like David Cronenberg and David Lynch as well as authors like Haruki Murakami and H.P. Lovecraft write about alternate universes which could coincide with this town. A concise summary of this project could be that it’s some kind of lovechild between Frank Lloyd Wright’s “A Home in a Prairie Town” and David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks”.

The architectural descriptive power of author H.P. Lovecraft is unparalleled in his novellas, often attributing humanistic qualities to the built environment, Lovecraft gives constructs as much personality as the characters themselves. Understanding these principals is an important aspect to "A Home in a Formal Town", the dialog between the homes is just as important as it is between the citizens that live there. In explicit instances paradollia comes to the forefront of the facades, this is where it becomes obvious that roles are reversed and the citizens are less important than the architecture.

This story investigates 10 different housing typologies, how they get along, and what a metropolis of these structures might look like. This is told through the adventures of the citizens living in their homes, creating a narrative that is both architectural but also interpersonal. Like how Wright’s “A Home in a Prairie Town” was a precursor to the Prairie Style, “A Home in a Formal Town” uses a similar tactic of a balance between orthographic drawing and lifestyle descriptions to create a manifesto for domestic living.