A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams

by Michael Pollan

“If I were asked to name the chief benefits of the house,” Bachelard wrote in a beautiful, quirky 1958 book called The Poetics of Space, “I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”

Daydreaming does not enjoy tremendous prestige in our culture, which tends to regard it as unproductive thought. Writers perhaps appreciate its importance better than most, since a fair amount of what they call work consists of little more than daydreaming edited. 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. And, I would guess, is probably a psychological necessity. For isn’t it in our daydreams that we acquire some sense of what we are about? 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.

Dipping recently into a multivolume history of private life edited by Philippe Ariès, I was fascinated to learn how the room of one’s own (specifically, the private study located off the master bedroom) and the modern sense of the individual emerged at more or less the same moment during the Renaissance. Apparently this is no accident: The new space and the new self actually helped give shape to one another. It appears there is a kind of reciprocity between interiors and interiority.

It reminded me just how much of reality slips through the net of our words, and that time spent working directly with the flesh of the world is the best antidote for abstraction.

Marshall McLuhan had likened opening the Sunday paper to settling into a warm bath. The metaphor delivered a tiny jolt of recognition, because I too found reading—reading almost anything—to be a vaguely sensual, slightly indulgent pleasure, and one that had very little to do with the acquisition of information. Rather than a means to an end, the deep piles of words on the page comprised for me a kind of soothing environment, a plush cushion into which sometimes I could barely wait to sink my head.

Mostly I just let the print wash over me, as if it were indeed warm water, destined to swirl down the drain of my forgetfulness.

(Though I was amused to see a few years later that Progressive Architecture had instituted a new department called the “postoccupancy critique,” in which a reporter actually visited a building in use to see how well it worked and what the people who worked or lived there actually thought about it. This was regarded in architecture-criticism circles as a radical innovation.)

design—as a process of creating forms that help negotiate between people and the real world—might

Wright always upheld the value of a native and regional architecture (one for the prairie, another for the desert) and resisted universal culture in all its guises—whether it came dressed in the classicism of Thomas Jefferson, the internationalism of the Beaux Arts movement, or the modernism of Le Corbusier.

Joe’s monosyllabic shrug masked strong feelings, and immediately I could see that this construction project was not going to escape the edginess that traditionally crops up between architects and builders, a complicated set of tensions rooted in real differences of outlook and interest and, inevitably, social class. On building sites all over the world, architects are figures of ridicule, their designs derided for their oddness or impracticality and their construction drawings, which on a job site are supposed to have the force of law, dismissed as cartoons or “funny papers.”

the shape of my building in the landscape. The simple, classical arrangement of posts and beams, their unweathered grain glowing in the last of the day’s light, stood in sharp relief against the general leafiness, like some sort of geometrical proof, chalked on a blackboard of forest. I stopped for a moment to admire it, and I filled with pride. The proof, of course, was of us: of the powers—of mind, of body, of civilization—that could achieve such a transubstantiation of trees.

Frank Lloyd Wright declared that “If the roof doesn’t leak the architect hasn’t been creative enough,”

whatever that whiskery sense is that allows us to perceive the walls around us even in the dark.

Such terms as “cyberspace,” “the electronic town hall,” “cybershacks,” “home pages,” and “the information highway” belong to the great tradition of raiding architecture for its real-world palpableness—its presence—whenever someone’s got something more abstract or ephemeral to sell.

For what finally is the ultimate architectural expression of the information culture we’re being told is upon us? Try to picture this not-so-primitive hut: a roof, beneath which sits a man in a very comfortable, ergonomically correct chair, with a virtual reality helmet strapped around his head, an intravenous feeding hookup tethered to one arm, and some sort of toilet apparatus below. Think of him as Vitruvian man—the outstretched figure in the circle in the square drawn by Da Vinci—updated for the twenty-first century. All that the information society really needs from architecture, apart from the comforting effect of its metaphors, is a chair and a dry cybershack to house this body.

Lumber comes in standard even-numbered lengths; two-by-fours are either eight, ten, or twelve feet long, and plywood sheets come four by eight. Indeed, eight feet is virtually the common denominator of American construction, going all the way back to the standard dimension of a bay in Colonial houses and barns; ever since, the number eight has been one of the more prestigious integers in carpentry.

I’ll fax you an S-K on that tomorrow.” “S-K” is architect talk for “sketch,” which seems a rather dubious abbreviation when you realize it actually takes longer to pronounce than the word it purports to crop. Evidently a certain amount of opaque insider talk is a professional imperative; indeed, without an inside and an outside you probably don’t have a profession.

transparency implied truthfulness and freedom, and opacity suggested deception,

As painters understand, the horizontal dimension is the eye’s natural field of play, the axis along which it ordinarily takes in the world. Compared to a vertical format, which is more likely to engage the whole body, inviting the viewer into the picture as if through a door, the horizontal somehow seems cooler, disembodied, more cerebral.

people seem instinctively to project themselves into the spaces they see, and we don’t imagine our upright bodies passing through a horizontal opening, just our eyes, and possibly our minds.

What came as news to me was the way a particular arrangement of hinges and handles on a sash could call forth a particular physical gesture in the act of opening it, engaging the body in a very specific way. This building now summoned a whole vocabulary of these gestures, and each expressed a slightly different attitude toward the world outdoors. It was something an actor would have grasped immediately, how, say, hoisting one of the big awning sashes and hooking it to its chain (they hung from a chrome chain suspended from the ridge beam) felt like lifting a garage door overhead and heading out into the bright workaday morning, or maybe it was more like propping up the wooden flaps on your root beer stand—another hopeful A.M. gesture that said OPEN FOR BUSINESS. Whereas pushing open the rock window, which was hinged on the side and swung out like some kind of utility door, had something distinctly hatchlike and vehicular about it: You almost wanted to reach out and give somebody the old thumbs-up before shoving off. As for the French casement on the south wall, this window opened in an altogether different and more genteel world—a bedroom, say, or kitchen—and the action of its sash called for a refined, even feminine gesture, two hands drawing the day in like a breath. This window you could open in your pj’s, where the side window called for a uniform, maybe, or jumpsuit.

habitation will trump design every time, and that is how it should be.

quote Ruskin, who had defended the craftsman against the inhumanity of the machine by declaring that “No good work whatever can be perfect, and the demand for perfection is always a sign of a misunderstanding of the ends of art.”

One time when I asked Charlie whether or not I should install a piece of trim over one particularly unfortunate gap that a mistake of mine had breached between a fin wall and the desk, he argued against it on the grounds trim here would be too finicky. “It’s okay for a building like this to have a few holidays,” he explained, employing a euphemism for error I’d never heard before; I suppose it has to do with taking the occasional day off from the reigning standards of workmanship, a most human thing to want to do.

came to see that the whole notion of furniture had more to do with the design and finish of my writing house than I’d ever imagined. I realized that its lack of trim and transparency of structure had less to do with the aesthetic of the Bauhaus than that of the furniture maker, who characteristically strives to make the decorative and the structural one—not by suppressing the decorative, but by elaborating and refining, almost lovingly, his structures. The furniture maker strives to emphasize the beauty of his joints, to highlight the ingenious ways a piece fits together and conveys its weight to the ground, and to bring out the inherent qualities of its materials with his painstakingly handworked finishes.

“First we shape our buildings,” Winston Churchill famously remarked, “and thereafter our buildings shape us.” It may be this kind of reciprocal action that best explains the tie between the Renaissance invention of the study and the age’s discovery of the self,

Alexander, Christopher, and Peter Eisenman. “Contrasting Concepts of Harmony: A Debate” in Lotus International (1983). This is the text of a fascinating, and heated, public debate held at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.