THE THINKING FOOT – A PEDESTRIAN STUDY OF PAVING

By Thomas A P Van Leeuwen

Edited by Helen I. Jessup

Designed by Eliane Beyer – Joseph Plateau – Amsterdam

The Thinking Foot is a study of history and associations. In method and form it claims to be no more (nor less) than an illustrated essay on the architectural expression of surface. It concentrates on the Earth on which we walk: not the Earth in depth (the underground world) nor the geological Earth, but simply the Earth as visible crust, as surface. The Thinking Foot is indeed about surface and in particular about how this surface was made into a ‘civilized’ theatre of communal existence. Civilization means turning things, mostly private or wild, into communal or civic use. Untreated surface becomes communal ground through paving. Paving has many qualities. It hardens the ground, it hides the ground, it equalizes the ground and it protects the ground. Aesthetics certainly play an important part in its appreciation, but on the whole paving is intended to be practical; the intention of paving is to be practical and useful. Throughout its evolution paving has proved to be a necessity with very little artistic ambition and almost no depth. It is surface, just that.

Date of publication:15 November 2023

Thomas A P Van Leeuwen, The Thinking Foot – A Pedestrian Study of Paving

“More than you’d ever thought you could know about walking in the city.”

“Thomas A.P. van Leeuwen is blessed with oblivious disregard for all the boundaries and restrictions that keep writers in the humanities divided into “fields” – call them corrals. He prances freely across any and all disciplines where he finds nourishment to feed his curiosity – not sate it, since his curiosity is unsatiable. In this unique book he infects the reader with something of the same. While reading it, and ever since, I have developed a sense I never knew I had for the nature and quality of the contact between my feet and the ground. Van Leeuwen insists, and he is right, that every instance of such contact has a character of its own. I now know that the ground that I have always taken for granted is the product of factors in society, politics, technology, public health concerns, city-planning, all their histories, and more, impacting differently on everywhere in the inhabited world. I now look at the materials, the patterning and the maintenance of the pavements on which I walk, and marvel at how much I have not been looking at or thinking about until now.

• The wealth of this book is impossible to sum up in a brief review. To give an idea of its depth and scope, here are the subjects of chapter XI, “Streets and Trottoirs:” “The Street. Pedestrian Domain. Paris and its Trottoir. The First Trottoir. A Note on the Umbrella. London and its Pavement. The Dublin Paving Board. The Amsterdam Stoop. The London Square.” That is for starters.
• Any conscientious pedestrian, and shouldn’t we all be that, will be robbing himself of insight into and the pleasure of knowing about, his own interaction with the everyday earth, without reading The Thinking Foot. Admirers of The Thinking Foot will be thrilled to know that it is “the final volume of a tetralogy exploring the relationship between architecture and the classical elements: Air, Water, Fire, and Earth.” There is little that is not grist for the mill of the prodigious Thomas A P Van Leeuwen.”

Reviewed by Gary Schwartz, luminary of art history and foremost Rembrandt scholar, for Amazon Books.UK