The mosaic floor at the Roman villa at Fishbourne in southern England display fantastical sea creatures. It becomes a representation of the sea, the great leveller and of the creation myths it carries in its depths.

At Fishbourne again the stylised borders and motifs echo scallop shells and gentle waves, the repetitive rythyms of the sea. Beyond these is the familiar chequerboard, the yin and yang of the building.

This sea scene from a Pompeiian villa is amongst the clearest demonstrations of floor as metaphorical sea, a taxonomy of ocean life.

Peter de Hooch's 'Boy Bringing Pomegranates' reveals the Dutch world of domesticity, for the first time the home is seen as the realm of women and children, with the menfolk exiled to taverns and streets. The floors change from rough dirt and sawdust to hygienic tiles representing order and cleanliness.

Vermeer's The Love Letter (1670) reveals a little more of the interior world captured by De Hooch, an intimate world of women. The brush leaning against the wall reminds of the new cleanliness whilst thre lightness (and darkness) of the floor highlights it as the stage upon which this little sexual and domestic episode is played.

The chequerboard floors in the choir at Sir Christopher Wren's St Paul's Cathedral in London (1675-1710). Darkness and light again at the heart of the church meant to symbolise London's new beginnings after the great fire of 1666.

The Choir at Westminster Abbey, the simple grid of black and white introduces an Enlightenment simplicity to the Gothic complexity of the great cathedral, marking a modern space in the old structure.

Masonic Temples have at their heart a chequerboard floor demonstrating the duality of nature, darkness and light. Here, at Bedford, Indiana, the patterns have been rotated through 45 degrees and form a clubby setting, a subtle twist which takes them from ritual to domestic.

A nook in Josef Hoffmann's stunning Palais Stoclet in Brussels, 1905-11. The high point of Viennese Secession each floor is a twist on the chequerboard theme familiar from the Dutch artistic visions of domesticity.

Adolf Loos, American Bar, 1908. Loos was a modernist but he was also concenred with archetypes. In this tiny Viennese bar, the chequered floor echoes the coffering of the ceiling creating an almost archaic and extremely rich interior which is all about light and dark, reflection and image and the grain and texture of material.

Artist Friendensreich Hundertwasser's Kunsthaus in Vienna takes the Secessionist architecture of Loos and Josef Hoffmann and perverts it. Here the chequerboard disintegrates into a blurry mess, the floor is uneven and disorientating. It is an extraordinary example of the adoption of the most rigorous of geometries and its subversion into a rolling landscape of colliding patterns, another clear example fo the influence of the irregular surface of water infuencing the innately flat floor.