THE LE ROY STEPS

Throughout time, the staircase has gained a great symbolic importance relying on its power to levitate (or raise). The first images of staircases appeared during the Middle Ages in religious paintings, where, through the multiplication of staircases, it was possible to show the various stages of Hell or Heaven. During the Renaissance this imagery of space was accentuated through the use of the perspective. Here the staircases where conceived as a “window opening into infinite space”. For the Tenebrous school, to which Piranesi belonged to, staircases were part of a vertical maze which unwound and lead, not to the liberating sky, but to a space of abyss . At this point, uncertainty and perhaps even fear surrounds the stairs.
This same play on symbolism has been adapted by various other genres such as film. Laurence Oiver’s Hamlet places the staircase as a prominent part in the setting, providing an entrance or exit for the characters as they move towards the unknown. Moreover, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo uses straight staircases of multiple flights to express both fear and wishes to descend.
In parallel, these maze-like-structure enhance the idea of movement. The labyrinthine constructions of Escher play with the idea of an infinite stair ascending and descending at the same time.
In Animal Locomotion, Eadward Muybridge used photography and kinetography to study movement. He worked with nude model ascending and descending staircases. Cubo-Futurist paintings such as Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase (1912, Philadelphia Museum of Art) also play with movement. In the latter, the painting’s composition is based on a diagrammatic superimposition of the human body’ s physique and movement, and the geometry of the staircase structure. Julio Cortazar’s short story, Instructions for climbing a staircase, touches on the poetry of the staircase and as the title suggests, plays with the vertical motion of the ground and of the body:
“Nobody can have failed to notice that the ground often rucks up in such a way that part of it rises, forming a right angle with the flat surface of the ground, while the next section runs parallel to that flat surface, followed by a new perpendicular, ad that this behavior is repeated in a spiral or a broken line, reaching extremely variable heights”.

Through its impact on various media including painting, photography, film, the staircase has established a specific role in the iconography of everyday life. My proposal of the Le Roy steps has slowly evolved to a more explicit exploration of the site and its play on the different associations and imagery, directly or indirectly, related to staircase. The surface has become a primary focus as I have attempted to record its particular characteristics, as well as the interactions, perceptions and relationships associated with it. As a result, weather, people, the body, movement and psyche are all elements inform and influence the site as well as my analysis of it. Using different media, my final presentation will consist of long scrolls revealing a 1 to 1 scale recording of the steps. In this endeavor, rather than proposing a conventional intervention, the site becomes the project itself; a process that acknowledges the richness and experience of the le Roy Steps.