Missing the Floor

Lately I have been pondering floors endlessly. It began by constantly thinking about the floor in my apartment. The floor is one of the six planes separating my studio from the rest of the spaces in townhouse where I live. But for the past six months it might as well have not existed. I can see it. I can touch it. But since renovations have been completed in the space directly under my apartment, and the room has been opened up for use by the family and their guest (parents, three noisy kids under 5, relatives, construction workers, etc.) there has been zero audio privacy. I can hear everything that they say and everything they do that makes any noise. The floor, at least in regards to one of its primary purposes, has become obsolete.

What do we expect from a floor? It needs to hold up a certain load without failing. We expect our floors to be stable. We expect them to feel solid and secure. For me opacity supports this function. I recently went to the Issey Miyake store for my studio class. The floor in the center of the showroom is wood, but the perimeter of the space is transparent. The beams, then the basement level, are visible below. I always take my first steps very tentatively on the transparent area. My own hesitance reminds me of my dog refusing to walk over the subway grate or the “Visual Cliff” study in psychology classes when crawling babies will circumvent a glass floor.

I react with more trepidation to the Apple store in Soho. I am not sure if stairs are essentially the same thing as floors but the central transparent floating stairs make me feel weak. And the floor of the Pratt library, made of glass blocks, brings in lovely light but also feels insecure. Same goes for the Main Hall of the Brooklyn Museum of Art. All of these floors are structurally stable, but don’t feel that way. They look like they are floating, and seem to make one feel as if they are hovering as well.