A Place of My Own

Pick it up: If you're interested in architecture and design, if the idea of a room of your own is appealing to you, if you'd like to read about someone working at and learning a skill, if you like reading about an idea turning into a design that is then given a concrete shape by construction, if you want to read a delightful memoir.

This book, as the author says in the introduction, is the biography of a building. It is broadly about the building of a writing room, a study, out in the woods that once made up the writer's back garden. There have been many books about building and renovating houses and other structures, but this one is different because the narrative does not stick to the details of the particular building that it is about. What it does, is move from the particular to the general and back again.

To quote from the introduction, this book “…could have been written about almost any building because at its heart is a narrative of the universal process of design and construction—which is to say, the age-old story of how dreams get turned into drawings that then get turned into wood and stone and glass, finally to take their place in the palpable world.”

Had he hired someone to build it for him, as any of us would’ve done, the building of this writing room would’ve been the familiar story of someone dealing with architects and contractors, the ballooning costs and endless delays. This book has all of that, but it has a whole lot more because Pollan’s inspiration for this project came not just from a desire to have a space of his own to work in, but also from a desire to build it himself.

He says that he had many reasons for wanting to build something with his own hands, but the chief reason was the desire to create something real, material and tangible. He wanted to step away from the world of words and screens which is where he spends most of his time, and challenge himself to learn new skills and to do something he'd never so much as attempted before.

Pollan built his writing room by working weekends over a period of two and half years with the help of an experienced carpenter and handyman. Though he began as a novice, being the assistant and following instructions, he learnt how to mix and pour concrete, how to build a foundation, how to handle wood, how to look at it and think about it, how to cut it, sand it and join it with other pieces of wood to build a bookshelf, a writing table and more.

Throughout this narrative he talks about everything that he was doing and learning in the process of building, and then he pans out to write about architecture and design in general, and the way they have evolved over time. He writes about conventions in architecture that have changed from traditional, functional and common-sense designs to art forms that while expressive and beautiful, don’t work as well for the people who have to live with them.

Running through the thread of this narrative is the idea of a room or a place of one’s own, how precious that is, how necessary. To quote Pollan again, “A room of one’s own: Is there anybody who hasn’t at one time or another wished for such a place, hasn’t turned these soft words over until they’d assumed a habitable shape? What they propose to anyone who admits them into the space of a daydream, is a place of solitude a few steps off the beaten track of everyday life.”

He writes about the connection between the cultivation of the self, as a being with a rich interior life and having a space of one’s own like a study to cultivate that self in. He traces the evolution of the humanist concept of the self which dates back to the renaissance, and the way this led to ideas about privacy and personal space, which in turn influenced the way we design and build our homes.

This is a remarkable book that is full of ideas and insights about everything from architecture, design, construction and woodworking, to history, philosophy, culture and tradition. It's an engaging, well-written, thoroughly delightful read.