Blogs & Ecology

The point of going to an office to work is to communicate with others. But for too many years we have been building our offices so that the only way to get around is by elevator. At some offices an alarm goes off if you try to use the stairs, and every separate office ends up being in a world of its own. That doesn't encourage a whole lot of inter-office communication.

In Minneapolis, SmithGroup designed some jazzy offices for law firm Bowman and Brooke, and critical to the design was a jazzy stair. Penny Broda writes in GreenSource:

"Most of the airy feeling comes from the o...

Litigators' heaven by Wiley Miller
, Full image here

We like showing examples of innovation in stair design; in non-residential settings it encourages people to walk instead of taking the elevator; in residential settings we like to show designs that take up less space and integrate storage.

Stairs with integrated storage by Splyce Design/Build

Here's to the man who invented stairs
And taught our feet to soar!
He was the first who ever burst
Into a second floor.
The world would be downstairs to-day
Had he not found the key;
So let his name go down to fame,
Whatever it may be. Oliver Herford (1863-1935)

Malaysian architect Kevin Low likes small projects; after working around the world on everything from master plans to high end condos, he still designs mailboxes. The folded stair was designed to bring natural daylight into the middle of a long, narrow property....

As we noted in our review of the New York Times Building communication stair, a standard principle of design today should be comfortable, bright stairs that serve as more than fire escapes, that encourage people to take the stairs instead of the elevator. This stair is in the Institute of Molecular Genetics for the Czech Academy of Science, and fittingly, is modeled after the form of the DNA double helix.

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It doesn't look as dramatic a some of the stairs we have shown on this site, does it? In fact, the story of this stair is pretty remarkable. It is in the New York Times Building, designed by Renzo Piano with FXFOWLE, where we had a tour conducted by David Thurm, Vice President and CIO.

The corner of a building is usually given over to an office for some big honcho; at the New York Times building it is given over to an open communication stair that serves that one purpose: to help people work together and communicate better. ...