With Feet Firmly Planted on Unstable Ground

This chapter reflects on floor and earth – their relationship and meanings – through several texts, including the poetry of Australian colonist Barron Field, the hagiography of Simeon Stylites, the writing of Japanese architect Arata Isozaki, and the ‘1909 Theorem’ famously discussed by Rem Koolhaas. These texts are read against descriptions of earth, memory and socialization in urban design and historical philosophy. The chapter argues that the floor, whose symbolic power lies in its suggestion to make space anew, is imagination; and that earth, where the stakes are laid and bodies are buried, is memory, identity and ownership. While public memory turns earth into places of tradition and socialization, the artificial floor is a barrier to these places, an anaesthetic to memory that cuts away time and allows constant renewal