The ground plan and its pavement as an architectural horizon

Abstract

The architect José Francisco García-Sánchez, in his book The trodden floor, urges us to focus our gaze on those floor plans that, due to their silence or condescension, are often forgotten when analyzing the architectural space where they always act as a base and foundation. The author was awarded the VII IUACC Prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis of the year 2022 organized by the University of Seville. The author has transformed the academic volume —his Ph.D. dissertation— into a book of exquisite workmanship, writing and iconography. The arduous work of reordering and synthesis has distilled a text in which the floor and pavement become an excuse to discuss universal aspects of Architecture. Atmospheres, textures, densities or materiality are factors that come together in pictorial, architectural or graphic examples that focus on pavements, demonstrating that nothing is trivial when it comes to Architecture with a capital ‘A’.