A STAIR IS ALWAYS an opportunity to introduce uncanny shapes, light from the sky and drama in the experience of a building. (Costa Mesa Library)
Stairs are a Baroque thing. Until the 16th and 17th centuries in the western tradition, stairs inside buildings were rarely meant to be seen. They were a means to get from floor to floor. It was not until the sculptor Michelangelo Buonarotti, faced with an odd circumstance at the Laurentian Library in Florence, that the stair came out of the closet. Auspiciously (or inauspiciously?) he turned it into an opportunity to invest in movement--a kind of controlled agitation-- in the composition and experience of a room or sequence of rooms.
THIS STAIR’S HERITAGE IS 15th and 16th C. Italian. It is by now a 500 year old practice and common to employ the stair as a way to open sight lines up, down and across an interior and to introduce daylight from the roof down through every floor of the building. (Costa Mesa Library)
Before then stairs, or steps really, were only mostly seen on the outside of buildings, a custom inherited from ancient days when temples, churches and monuments were lifted off the ground to reflect their elevated status as the most important buildings around. Around the 15th century, as societies increasingly turned their attention toward secular endeavors (palaces, villas, museums, theaters, city halls, libraries, schools, hospitals and so on), the most important buildings in town began to have multiple floors.
AT REST AND RESTLESS We can appreciate both kinds of experiences and with new technologies, we will recover the ability to produce both alternatively, together and/or apart. (San Lorenzo, Brunelleschi and San Giorgio, Palladio on the left; Guggenheim Bilbao on the right)
POISED AND COUNTERPOISED buildings and spaces are equally valid in the range of experiences we want architecture to create. (Bramante’s Cloister and Palazzo Cancelleria on the left; San Francisco Federal Courthouse and Cal Trans Headquarters by Morphosis on the right)
The stairs that linked those floors rarely enjoyed prominence or even visibility until after Buonarotti’s library unleashed a trend that has lasted to this day—the out-in-the-open stair treated at once as a place to be, an object to look at, an occasion for an entrance or other staged drama. In America, we live with this heritage perhaps most ubiquitously in the form of the stair-in-the-entry-hall that is the must-have of any McMansion worth its asking price.
PODIUMS AND STADIUMS were the few ways in which we experienced steps in the built environment until a half a millennium ago when important buildings began to have multiple stories.
STAIRS WERE RARELY SEEN in the formal architecture of important buildings before the end of the 16th century. (Palazzo Farnese left and below right; typical 15th century Roman palace above right)
PALLADIO HAD NO INTEREST in what we now take for granted—the expressive potential of stairs. He instead was after an environment at rest in which the dimensions of our body are in sync with the articulated dimensions of rooms and sequences of rooms we occupy. (Villa Chiericati, left and lower right; Villa Malcontenta above right)
Then buildings became stairs. Adolf Loos at the Muller House in Prague in 1930 staged a domestic interior that had not before been seen. He offset and stepped floors, rooms no longer discrete but open to one another, interiors arranged as a stage set (you could see diagonally across, up and down sequences of “spaces” ) manifesting a dramatic even slightly unsettling visual effect. He called this technique Raumplan. He claimed the technique was driven by function (rooms placed and sized according to purpose) though clearly there was more at play. He was after the effect.
MICHELANGELO OPENED A CAN OF WORMS when he responded to an odd condition with a unique solution—the out-in-the-open stair expressed as an object. (Laurentian Library, Florence)
THE 17TH CENTURY brought us the theatrical experience in architectural thought and practice. (Piranese above, typical Baroque theater, below)
In America over the next fifty years, stepped, open-ended compositions dominated the character of architecture from Paul Rudolph in the east to Ray Kappe in the west and in the incarnation with which we are most familiar the “split-level” house that first proliferated across the suburbs in the 1950s. By now, the orthodoxy of spatial indeterminacy has indurated into a mindset, a visual habit, a fixation with maybe even an addiction to the uncanny, levitation, flux, the drama of action caught fixed in place. We see it manifested in the gestural free form, biomorphic and neo-constructivist architecture of our time.
BY THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES the open stair was standard practice in traditional and modern architecture. (Paris Opera House, Garnier, left; Villa Savoye, Charles Jeanneret, right)
THE SPIRAL STAIR CASE in each of these two cases is a room. (Vatican Double Helix Staircase, Bramante, left; Guggenheim New York, Wright, right)
A STAIR THAT’S A BUILDING is nothing new either. (Palazzo dello Spagnolo, Naples, left; The Vessel, New York, right)
Buonarotti’s predecessors and his contemporaries, such as Bramante in the south and Palladio in the north, employed the classical language of architecture and its decorative motifs in a measured way, mathematically calibrated, with relationships of parts (ratios) nested within one another (proportion) to create an environment at rest, unchanging and eternal. Their purpose was to focus our attention as we moved through these environments on the underlying harmony of the world and our relationship with it (and by extension the cosmos). The decoration was more than embellishment, it had an articulating role.
RAUMPLAN was the term that Loos coined to describe his approach to the designs of interiors meant to disrupt the rigidity of stacked floors and rooms in sequence that was until then the norm. (Villa Muller, Loos, Prague 1930)
OPENING VISTAS diagonally up, down and across loosely defined “spaces” created interiors like stage sets. (Villa Muller, Loos, Prague, 1930)
Buonarotti was a restless artist. He insisted he was a sculptor, although obviously he was at home as a painter and an architect. As a sculptor, his life’s work was to infuse life into inert stone. It jumped species when he anthropomorphized the classical language of architecture—columns posed like figures within frames, capitals and brackets squeezed and stretched like muscles and tendons, stairs that appear to move up or down. The decoration had an expressive role, it was flesh on bones.
SPLIT LEVEL INTERIORS were widely embraced across America after 1950 especially within domestic interiors. (Paul Rudolph, New York above, Ray Kappe, Los Angeles below)
THE EXPRESSIVE AND SPATIAL POTENTIAL OF STAIRS AND STEPS have been widely embraced across the architecture of our time. (Gehry left, Koolhaus above right, Holl below right)
Frank Gehry, among others, lamented the late-modern propensity to apply expensive materials to boring buildings and he was right. There is a difference between stasis and stagnation. It was lazy to rely on marble veneers and wood panels to fulfill the role of ornament in the pursuit of “honest” design or “understated elegance” and deadening. He, among others, instead commandeered modern technology and common materials to create exciting, restless buildings, full of life, with a kind of spontaneity and fluidity that even surpasses the drama of the Baroque. The buildings are the decoration.
WE WITNESS THE DEGRADATION OF AN IDEA in the must-have-grand-stair of McMansions and split- level houses of suburban America, both of which debase the original innovation from which they derive.
If, though, when we simultaneously censor ourselves (embellishment, bad) and indulge ourselves (drama, good) in the unceasing quest for excitement, do we miss out? Does constant excitement dull our senses? Do we cease to attend to our environment in any other than superficial ways? The Palladian interior is neither minimalist nor boring—it is (anticipating Einstein’s cosmic fields) a field of forces that integrates the human body in the experience of it, not as a spectator but as a participant. While we lament the loss of craft, craftspeople and craftsmanship, we nevertheless are confident that with AI, Robotics and 3-D printing we will find our footing again, recover not the classical language of architecture but still the ability to articulate environments at rest that are also not dead.
THE CONVERSATION PIT perhaps first introduced by Saarinen in the Miller House in 1957 quickly became an object of ridicule, but old ideas under new circumstances can always find new life (Miller House, Saarinen, Columbus, ID left; Johnson Favaro proposal for the Santa Monica College Arts Complex lecture theater and exhibit space, right)
STAIR AS OBJECT OR STAIR AS PLACE. (UCLA Administrative Headquarters, Johnson Favaro, Westwood, CA, above right; West Hollywood Library, Johnson Favaro below right)
STAIR AS OBJECT AND STAIR AS PLACE. (Art Gallery, Johnson Favaro Pacific Palisades, CA)