A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams

by Michael Pollan

Architects do their work on the frontier between the ideal and the practical, translating wisps of ideas into buildable facts, and carpenters are among those lucky souls whose handiwork actually adds to the available stock of reality.

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?

You couldn’t help feeling responsible for pieces of wood like this, and risking a mistake—learning on them, which is after all what I proposed to do—seemed almost unconscionable, a sacrifice of something that had been sacrificed once already.

Up until the second half of the nineteenth century, the joiner, or housewright—to use the two terms by which carpenters were then known—possessed the cultural authority and prestige that architects possess today.

So maybe it was shame as much as exultation that brought me down off the frame that early summer evening, sent me out into the woods in quest of an evergreen to kill.