Context 152 - November 2017

36 C O N T E X T 1 5 2 : N O V E M B E R 2 0 1 7 Floorscape in art and design Notes from the chair My father, a scholar of the classics, remarked to me when I was young that the literature of the ancients was liberally sprinkled with two recurring complaints: the young no longer respecting their elders and the dire state of the streets. I suspect this rather odd pairing was intended to bear a lesson on its first element; but I have always remembered it as a truth concerning the latter. Complaints about the state of the streets are as old as streets themselves. This is, perhaps, not surprising: they are used by all but maintained at the public expense. The connection between the wear and tear attributable to any one of us and our acceptance of the consequent taxation is scarcely perceptible to us as individuals. On the other hand, we can be quick to note the low priority seemingly given, despite paying our taxes, to the maintenance of the particular streets we use from day to day. If you are reading this column in a quest for the answer to this conundrum you need read no further. It isn’t here. It seems that the Greeks may have had a pretty laid-back attitude to public floorscapes. Despite the refinement of their formal architecture, REWycherley tells us in How the Greeks Built Cities that only streets and interiors of the highest status were paved. Perhaps in a society in which philosophy and mathematics were prized they just accepted that circles can not be squares. Despite getting to grips with town planning in the Hellenistic period, improvements to the quality of pavement had to wait for the advent of Roman engineering. Sellar andYeatman in 1066 and All That tell us what we all already knew about Roman roads – that they were all straight and all led to Rome – but the references in that work are substandard. In fact, a considerable amount is known about Roman streets and floorscapes from archaeology and texts. In Book 7 of De Architectura Vitruvius sets out the then standard The Romans’ technique of setting tesserae of marble, and other materials with natural colours, in concrete gave a very hard-wearing finish as well as considerable design potential, both geometric and pictorial, without the much higher cost and technical difficulty of quarrying and accurately cutting and laying tiles of a larger size. But it did depend on the all-important process of rubbing down, which Vitruvius emphasises must not be skimped. The point is aptly made elsewhere in these pages that, of all architectural elements, floorscapes are the most subject to wear and tear, and are thus always the likeliest candidate for periodic renewal. It is not surprising that ancient floorscapes are more likely to have survived as archaeology and in art than as continuously used surfaces. Some artists have used the absence of floorscape detail for oppressive methods of paving interior and exterior spaces. The basic formula was similar to what we now call granolithic paving, laid either directly on compacted hardcore or over a timber sub-floor constructed to very specific directions. In the specification for exterior surfaces Vitruvius pays particular attention to the need for cross-falls of 1:80 (two digits in 10 feet) to promote surface water run-off and the maintenance of water-tightness to prevent frost damage. This is a lesson still needing to be prioritised by present-day highway authorities, but Vitruvius’s recipe to this purpose of an annual autumn treatment of recycled waste from the olive-oil industry seems unlikely to be revived. Just how the early-19th-century Scottish engineer John McAdam came to provide the sobriquet for the Romans’ specification for graded pavement remains a mystery. Medieval tiles inWinchester Cathedral’s retrochoir (Photo: John Crook, www. john-crook.com)