An Obsession with Rigour or a Lack of Imagination and Commitment?

Flooring – the rigorous ones would probably look it up in an explanatory dictionary to see what it means. Anyway, flooring consists of slats or wooden boards arranged on a certain surface. Thus, we have the diagonal flooring, which was in high fashion in a bygone era, the flooring arranged in perfectly regular squares, the “English” flooring, with the slats arranged one next to another, but using the same rigorous geometry and shifting the slats accordingly, so that is has fluidity, and the “willy-nilly” flooring, with wooden slats arranged in an “English” manner, but without carefully thinking of the shift of the slats in these staggered patterns. The latter pattern is somewhat more human-like, due to its lack of rigour, and it also has a more pleasant, more diverse texture. The square pattern, however, is by far the most sought after, as it is regarded as “elegant”, “balanced”, “tasteful” and so on.

The square flooring is by far the most boringly regular, geometrised, with no element of fantasy, it’s a typical choice and attitude of someone who tries hard to assemble an organic matter, wood in this instance, in a repetitive industrial matrix and with no vision. Nature and wood have accustomed us to the game of asymmetry in symmetry, but we rarely see that anymore. Instead, we see endlessly boring textures, which are easy to make and assemble however, because they are made industrially, by lifeless cars. Before becoming flooring, the wood was a living, deformed, gnarled organic matter, with growth accidents, all of this giving it a special beauty element, precisely due to its irregularity, the natural hazard and the uniqueness of each tree.

But we only take the material and strip it of its beauty, texture and depth, we assemble it in order to be perfect, using it to fill spaces with regular, dull grids. Our imagination is limited and so is what results from it: the square flooring. We like the predictable, we feel comfortable in our regularising self-sufficiency, we are obsessed with the idea of perfection and we no longer see the forest and its amazing diversity, the mix of old and new, green and dry, asymmetry, texture, randomness. We steal this wonderful material and put it in a matrix that no longer has anything to do with the poetry of the mix behind the wood.

Unfortunately, the predictable and boring matrix flooring is everywhere, not only in people’s homes, but also in the flooring of our thoughts and evaluations, the bland and the lack of appreciation and penetration of diversity is becoming the recipe of life in the vast majority of cases. We therefore end up not being able to see the richness of the world’s textures, we prefer to transform it in our own image and likeness, limiting, limited, framed in soulless rules, but with a great advantage: predictability. Predictability which gives us a false sense of security and the impression that we can frame the world through conventional matrices.

Of course, any similarity to real situations and people is absolutely accidental, and this text was inspired by the centre of an imaginary city matrix, perfectly aligned, predictable, not at all diverse, not colourful, not textured, without depth, untroubled, without beauty, but not at all ugly, without good or bad, flat and two-dimensional, like the silver tip that was the world 1,000 years ago, when people still didn’t know the Earth was round.