The Epic of the Stair: The Music of Ascent and Descent

The stair is read as built music and as architecture deciding to move, beginning with the body, the first step and the temples and palaces of early civilizations. It climbs the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, Mayan pyramids, Egypt, Greece and the Roman amphitheatre, then the spiral stair, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, castles, Michelangelo's Laurentian Library, the Spanish Steps, Versailles and the Alhambra. The minaret, the minbar and the Damascene house bring the stair home, where children play on it and the old feel its height, before Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater, Louis Kahn, Tadao Ando, Carlo Scarpa, Alvar Aalto, Oscar Niemeyer and the Guggenheim. Brownstone stoops in New York, glass stairs, the emergency stair and Grand Central follow, and the book closes on the stair as a lesson in respect for gravity.