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(1979) has said; they evoke ‘thoughts of living on the steps, of
sleeping on the landings’.
Generally speaking, a staircase is a distributor through
which occupants or users gain access to rooms, but it is also a
place of encounter, of exchange, where we perceive visible or
audible traces of everyday life. The architecture fosters such
communicative functions when it goes beyond the pure chan-
nelling of movement in order to offer opportunities for tem-
porary sojourn, whether as economical extensions of space
or as painstakingly designed spaces of arrival and encounter.
For purposes of > entrance and self-display, details are not
unimportant: it matters whether one emerges to view from
above with one’s legs appearing first, or whether an adroitly
positioned stair head allows one’s entire figure appear from
the side.
The architecture of representative staircases in palaces,
courthouses and opera houses do justice to the enjoyment
that can be offered by perceiving one’s own dramatized move-
ments in relation to other moving bodies. Now, the staircase
becomes a stage. In the Baroque in particular, its scenic po-
tential was exploited in especially splendid and refined ways,
with spacious staircases serving to stage magnificent ceremo-
nies of reception and escort. In public buildings during the
nineteenth century, including Charles Garnier’s Paris Opera,
the staircase becomes a scenic metaphor for society as a
whole whose members comment upon one another’s appear-
ance while ascending and descending, just as in social life,
and even comment on the way in which they themselves are
being observed.
Basically, however, any domestic staircase, providing it
opens out upon a room of sufficient dimensions, can be used
as a stage for a modest entrance. In this instance, the staircase
can just as well serve as a place to sit, in which case it offers
the spectator an unobstructed view. On a larger scale, this
form was widely diffused in the antique amphitheatre, where
the area below the steps (orchestra) serves as a stage.