This flight of steps runs up the outside of a Modernist house in Switzerland. What is striking here is the precise construction of relationships. The gaps between steps allow crisp lines of light to fall on the darkly shadowed wall, reinforcing the subtlety of the dialogue between granite and the concrete, which has been bush-hammers to expose the stone aggregates.
...There is something hypnotic about stair climbing, and as often as I find myself thinking I ought to be at the fourth floor when I am only at the third, I think I've only gotten to three when I'm actually arriving at four.
...To my eyes (and legs) the straight run is more elegant and enjoyable to ascend.
...The narrowing is both functional and artistic, acknowledging that a stair is likely to be used by a smaller number of people as it rises and forcing the perspective narrowing of the long view upward.
...The symbolic weight of stairs is embodied in both their form and their magnitude.
For two and a half months I did not see a stairway in America. They are something that has been buried...hidden behind a door that you are not supposed to open.
Picture a blind man probing his way with a cane. While he is alert to the feelings in the hand holding the cane, the crucial distinction may be defined by saying that these feelings are not watched in themselves, but that he watches something else by way of them, that is, by keeping aware of them. He has a subsidiary awareness of the feelings in his hand, feelings which are merged into a focal awareness at the end of the cane, constituting two kinds of awareness that are mutually exclusive — "from awareness" and "focal awareness".
There is here a particularly interesting phenomenal transformation. The sensations of the cane on his hand (the surface of the cane as it touches the palm of his hand, etc.) are lost. Instead, he feels the end of the cane as it touches an object...If our blind man shifts his attention from the tip of his cane to his hand, the meaning on the end of the cane disappears.