By Edwin Heathcote
When Dutch artists began to depict bourgeois interiors, the floor suddenly took on a surprisingly pivotal role in art. It ceased to exist merely as a neutral background, a simulacrum of the earth outside, and instead became a theatrical stage for the subtly unfolding, heavily symbolic episodes portrayed. Pieter de Hooch’s A Boy Bringing Pomegranates, from 1662, perfectly shows this complex layering of exquisitely rendered floor finishes, an unfolding of the domestic world portrayed through surface.
The Dutch at around this time in effect invented the modern residential interior. The combination of the emergence of banking and colonial trade and the wealth they created, allied with a Calvinist sensibility, produced a domestic architecture of incredible refinement. That society was also radically egalitarian. The home, for the first time, became the realm of women and children. De Hooch’s subjects were not the epics of myth and religion but the portrayal of domesticity and the paintings were displayed in exactly the kind of dwellings they pictured.
The Calvinist obsession with order, tidiness and cleanliness was reflected in the ubiquity of the tiled floor, scrubbed clean daily not by servants but by the mistress of the house herself. De Hooch’s picture shows first the canal, then the sunlit pavement, then the tiles of an arched entrance, a courtyard and finally the black-and-white tessellations of the interior proper. The gateway marks the threshold between public and private. The terracotta colour of the chequerboard of the courtyard paving marks a private exterior; the earth is represented in the red clay tiles and the man-made artifice of the interior is marked by black and white.
This chequerboard scheme recurs throughout history. It is there in both London’s Westminster Abbey and St Paul’s Cathedral. It appears in everyday Victorian terraced houses and in the lushest interiors of the Vienna secession. It is there at the centre of Masonic ritual, representing the floor of Solomon’s temple and the idea of the inseparability of darkness and light, good and evil. It is there, presumably for similar reasons, in the nightmarish vignettes of David Lynch and, of course, in the chessboard, where it implies we are but pawns in the great game.
Paradoxically though, the application of order through a grid imposed on the floor also encapsulates the Enlightenment ideal, the very modern idea that mankind can structure the world. The impulse to impose a grid (on the floor or in latitude and longitude) is the same as that which led to the navigation of the globe and Holland’s astonishing, if brief, moment as the world’s dominant naval and colonial power. The Dutch not only imposed order on the landscape through the imposition of grids, they actually created the land itself. The dykes, canals and polders, reclaimed from the sea, were refined in microcosm in the rigour of the interior.
Each material manifestation of the floor is in some way an attempt at ordering the interior world. Parquet, bare floorboards, carpets and rugs each impose a pattern that dresses the floor as a stage for the choreography of the everyday. Very different, though, was the ancient conception of the floor.
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, British architect WR Lethaby referred to “pavements like the sea”. His thesis was that, for the ancients, the floor was a representation of the primordial waters. Look at the mosaic floors of a Roman villa from Fishbourne, in West Sussex, to Pompeii and you will often see fish, sea creatures and a border of abstracted waves. The floors of palaces were, according to ancient descriptions, of marble so shiny it appeared like the shimmering surface of water or figured in such a way as to imitate ripples and waves. Water always finds its own level, so it becomes the natural metaphor. In modern floors of poured concrete, we see the literal manifestation of a liquid surface made solid.
The modernist dwelling with its lino and fitted carpets squeezed this symbolism out. The floor became instead a seamless surface, a bland continuity. It is intriguing to see how, from reclaimed floors to rugs, it has been brought back as a meaningful element.
If we return to de Hooch’s painting, we can also see a little raised platform on the right, upon which is perched a solitary chair. Because a floor is level, any slight elevation automatically privileges that raised area. Here we see a private space for sitting, probably to catch the light from the window above, perhaps a seat for reading or sewing. It is the simplest possible architectural device, yet it radically alters the character of the room. It seems surprising that so little is done with floors. They are, after all, the stages upon which our lives are acted out.
