A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams

by Michael Pollan

Yet anyone who reads for pleasure should prize it too, for what is reading a good book but a daydream at second hand? Unlike any other form of thought, daydreaming is its own reward. For regardless of the result (if any), the very process of daydreaming is pleasurable.

Where we try on futures and practice our voices before committing ourselves to words or deeds? Daydreaming is where we go to cultivate the self, or, more likely, selves, out of the view and earshot of other people. Without its daydreams, the self is apt to shrink down to the size and shape of the estimation of others.

George Bernard Shaw’s writing hut, for example,

an eight-by-eight pine shack at the bottom of his garden, was constructed on a steel turntable that allowed him to single-handedly rotate the building during the course of the day, in order to follow the arc of the sun. What could better suit a playwright than a house that looked at the world not from any one angle, but from every possible angle in turn?

It seemed to me that the difference between gardening and building was a little like the difference between cooking (which I like to do) and baking (which I can’t), a difference that has everything to do with one’s attitude toward recipes. Mine has always been cavalier.

Not similar at all...

Human beings, like other animals, have a genetic predisposition to seek out for their habitats those landscapes that are most conducive to their well-being and survival.

The testimony of our senses seems adamant that space is full of interruptions and breaks and places qualitatively different one from another—places that seem to us special, if not magical. All

But it seems to me it’s one thing to disturb people in a museum or private home where anyone can choose not to venture, and quite another to set out to disorient office workers or conventioneers or passersby who have no choice in the matter. And who also haven’t been given the chance to read the explanatory texts—the words upon words upon which so many of these structures have been built.

Even when Wright himself went to war against gravity, his purpose was not to escape the ground so much as to honor it.

“It’s up to you” just might be the single most irritating thing you can say to somebody under the circumstances, a cranky parody of the liberty it pretends to bestow.

The building that refuses to embrace the contingencies of regulation and economics, of the weather and the ground, of the available technology and the abilities of its builders, is a building that never gets built.

“Call it good,” Joe will say.

I’d read recently that said that men are more adept than women at mentally rotating an object in space, a skill I’d never had occasion to think about, much less appreciate, before. Women supposedly have the edge in verbal agility, which seemed much the better deal. Not today. Here it was, right in front of me, a full-dress display of the male genius.

Crafts movement’s liberal line on mistakes: “There is hope in honest error,” one designer had declared, “none in the icy perfections of the mere stylist.”

This is because no single individual can possibly know enough to make from scratch something as complex and layered and thick as a great place; for the necessary help, he will need to invoke the past, and also the future.