Pavement

Architecture differs from the other visual and performance-based arts in one fundamental respect: its interdependence on the ground upon which it sits. Clearly, sculpture, in its most monumental and public manifestation, shares with architecture its particularity of place; while at the other end of the spectrum, temporary art structures or installations - like nomadic tents, which can also be architectural - have more in common with the transience of performance and the passing of a musical note.

The grounded quality of architecture can also render it a significant meeting point for the specific historical and geological moment. In the ancient act of founding, the first incision of the plough marks out the boundaries of a city, the furrow peeling back the crust of the seasons to reveal the bedrock of time on which a defensive wall is erected and the future incubated.

The complex cultural interdependence of the surface and geological substance of the ground is immediately apparent in the 'fervour' of wine- or cheesemakers for their local terroir. Like a discussion of the specificity of the ecosystems that miraculously deliver the bacterial bloom on the skin of a grape, the stones that make up the pavements we walk on have their own particular qualities that, when combined with the traditions of laying down, create an instantly recognisable texture, colour and scale - an indelible link to a particular context.

Boyle Family, Holland Park Avenue Study, London Series, 1967 and Cobbles Study, Lorrypark Series, 1976
Boyle Family's 'Journey to the Surface of the Earth' raised the pavement through their urban taxidermy of the everyday, to the status of high culture. Shown here is part of a display of their work at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh in 2003.

Latent Common Ground

We tend to take pavements for granted. In fact, they are so much a part of the ritual of daily life that it is as sources of disruption that they first come to mind: the seemingly endless round of upheavals that are caused by the repairing of pipes, threading of new cables, or the re-laying of so often inadequately repaired surfaces. Paradoxically, they bear the earliest and the most recent traces of habitation: on the one hand, the grid of streets that make up towns and cities is the most permanent of topographical features (ironically becoming more so as the ground beneath fills with an ever-increasingly complex maze of services); on the other hand, the rituals of renewal, the gathering of detritus and debris embodied in street cleaning are a litmus test of municipal order, the economics of taxation and social habit. I was first consciously struck by this extreme polarity in the work of the artists Boyle Family. Their exhibition 'Journey to the Surface of the Earth' at London's Serpentine Gallery in the early summer of 1975 depicted, with sharp-focused super-realism and a taxidermic instinct for preservation, the unexpected dislocation of sections of the pavement surfaces on to the gallery wall. The permanence of a kerb stone or a gulley was juxtaposed with the immediacy of the jettisoned and weather-blown human traces - cigarette butts, dust and paper - located by the chance encounter of a dart thrown at a city map.

Coincidentally, over time, gathering thoughts for seminars, for precedent studies and just musing on different settings, I became aware that my own pre-digital 35mm-film archive contained a series of photographs, taken inadvertently in the process of 'winding on' the film into the camera, which were often images of pavements. They became for me the equivalent of a scientist's Petri dish, for it becomes strikingly clear that so much that is particular to a place is embodied in its pavements, geology, modules, textures and habits. This chapter sets out to explore through examples the hidden depths of this latent common ground. Whether negotiated with the tapping antennae of the blind, the jogger's air-cushioned soles, or a child's running feet, we all share the continuous appraisal of what is at the next instant to be found underfoot. We are able to ascertain in a calibration of extraordinary finesse and agility, the paving stone's qualities: its firmness, slipperiness, evenness or even its inclination - something that has continued to elude the best efforts of robotics. For that is what pavements are about: movement and temporality.

Paving the Sacred, Profane and Political

The other dimension that is provocatively striking is the way that pavements, while embodying both the everyday and most seemingly mundane rituals of life, have also led to some of the most sophisticated representations of cosmological order. Pavements provide evidence of political and cultural will. This can be autocratic as in the ubiquitous homogeneity of the brick surfaces of the Imperial Palace in the Forbidden City of Beijing, or the concrete Autobahnen of the Third Reich; mercantile as in the meeting of sea and desert in the Gulf States and the great trading routes of the Silk Road and salt roads; ceremonial as in the entry at London Bridge to the City of London (see the following section of this chapter); sacred as in the pilgrim routes of Europe and the processional way followed for millennia in a city like Enna in Sicily; or bridge the shared territories of the sacred and the secular as in the streets of Bhuleshwar in Mumbai.

Close-up photographs of pavements
Left to right: Henrietta Street, Dublin, Ireland, vestiges of grandeur and dereliction; monumental interlocking slabs of the Corso di Porta Ticinese, Milan, Italy; pavement detail of the Chiado, Lisbon, Portugal; reordered field stones, setts and precast paths at the Stortorget, Kalmar, Sweden; Stolpersteine, Martin-Luther-King-Platz, Hamburg, Germany; water's edge at San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, Italy; detail of the opus sectile work of the Cosmati sanctuary pavement, Westminster Abbey, London; Proconnesian marble slabs forming the floor, a frozen sea, in the Hagia Sophia, Istanbul, Turkey.

The basic unit of paving, the stone, provides it with a universal and timeless quality, whether it is a trail staking out a route or a monument marking a deceased life. It is this aspect that is explored in the final section of this chapter, regarding memory, through the pilgrim passage around the sacred water basin of Banganga Tank in India and the Stolpersteine project by artist Gunter Demnig, which erects cobblestone-sized memorials to individual victims of the Nazis.

While the Autobahnen, trading and pilgrimage routes stretch the spatial boundaries of the citizen's right of passage as a pedestrian into the realm of travel over long homogeneous and repetitive surfaces that connect urban centres, the particularity of the paving of a sacred space combines a reverie on the ecstatic vertical contemplation of earth and sky. This culminates in the floorscapes of public buildings where meditation on surfaces becomes a key to temporal reflection - geological in the materiality of stone, historical through geometric arrangement, and human through the individual and the drama of ritual. This is highlighted in the sea-like expanse of the Proconnesian marble floor in the nave of the Hagia Sofia in Istanbul (see the section of this chapter on 'Sacred Surfaces'). The pavement, or der Bürgersteig (literally 'citizens' way'), is therefore much more about the individual's liberty to see and be seen, to participate in the daily drama of the city, than about circulation, security and segregation. For Álvaro Siza, restoring the pavement of Lisbon's Chiado district (see 'Lisbon's Carpet' section of this chapter) was also an essential first step in revitalising the area after a fire in 1988. An emphasis on the routine aspects of the everyday points to the difference between the Situationists' 'society of the spectacle',1 or the tourists' fleeting appetite, and the daily round of working, learning, playing and ageing in the unfolding cycles of politics and cultural change from the citizen's point of view. Public space is not a given that naturally evolves; it often has to be reasserted and redefined - most recently in order to fend off the dominance of the car. This is demonstrated in the successful regeneration and pedestrianisation of Stortorget, the 17th-century main square of Kalmar in Sweden, by Caruso St John Architects and artist Eva Löfdahl (see 'Field of Stones, Kalmar' section of this chapter). The citizens' pavement as opposed to the gated realm is also an important test of society's inclusiveness. Like a section of Giambattista Nolli's 1748 plan of Rome or the classical city, how far the stain of public access penetrates the body of the city suggests a culture's vitality and common ground. The artificiality of a corporate section of the city, like Broadgate or Canary Wharf in London, is made clear when these boundaries are challenged.

London Bridge

Closed doors and chain-link fencing are not the only protagonists in the shifting sands of the politics of the pavement; borders, for instance - those of ownership as in the 'estates' of London or boroughs - play their part, as does the mind-set of the...