When Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own was first published in 1997, its understated subtitle was The Education of an Amateur Builder. Upon its reissue with a new preface in 2008, following the bestselling success of his books The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, it carried a more sweeping and telling one: The Architecture of Daydreams.

The motivations behind Pollan's substantial account of first imagining, then actually constructing his own writing space, are rooted in longing. Nearly forty years old with a pregnant wife, having recently transitioned from an identity as New York City-based magazine staff member to freelance writer working from a rural home, the Michael Pollan of the late twentieth century craves a legacy beyond words.

Not content to dwell in the abstract sphere of ideas and sentences, he is drawn past Virginia Woolf’s desire for a secure and solitary writing space (as expressed in her essay "A Room of One’s Own") in the do-it-yourself direction of Henry David Thoreau and his cabin in the woods.

With the help of Charles R. Myer, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based architect and friend, and Joe Benney, a local jack-of-all-trades, Pollan spends two-and-a-half years of weekends in his northwest Connecticut wooded backyard building an eight-by-thirteen-foot wood-framed, shingle-roofed structure consisting of a built-in desk, a daybed, a porch, a stove, and bookshelves.

"I wanted not only a room of my own, but a room of my own making," the self-described "radically unhandy" Pollan writes. "I wanted to build this place myself. It was right around this time that I stumbled upon a French writer named Gaston Bachelard. ‘If I were asked to name the chief benefits of the house,’ Bachelard wrote in The Poetics Of Space, ‘I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.’ An obvious idea, perhaps, but in it I recognized at once what it was I’d lost and dreamed of recovering."

For bookworms entering into October, or Archtober (ärk'tōbər), as New York City's Architecture and Design Month is known, Pollan’s consideration of construction is a good place to start in seeking context for the month-long festival of architecture activities and programs.

With tours, lectures, films and exhibitions focused on the everyday importance of architecture and design, we’re encouraged to pause and consider the value of our built environment. Pollan achieves the same effect with his narrative, interweaving self-discovery with a foundational orientation in centuries of architecture-related literature. It turns out to be a pretty heady exploration for an adventure that was meant to be an escape from the intellect and an immersion in the practical.

Halfway across the globe as summer wanderlust fades, and we reconsider the human-made spaces where we'll hunker for the coming colder months, more than 1,750 architects representing more than 60 countries are also preparing to explore much of the same terrain Pollan covers in his book. In a setting more glittery than his quiet backyard, partners and potential clients will mingle over seminars and gala dinners at the World Architecture Festival taking place October 2 – 4 in Singapore.

At these festivals full of visionaries merging the imagined with the real, and at Pollan’s place in the woods, one thing remains both dynamic and constant. As he says of walking his property seeking a place to put his writing house, "I realized I wasn't just looking for a view, but for something more personal than that -- a point of view."