Higher Education’s Best New Staircase, and Some Contenders From the Past

Looking up at the underside of a 19th-century staircase at the Peabody Institute, in Baltimore. (Chronicle photographs by Lawrence Biemiller)

Nowdays so many staircases are tucked away in dull cinder-block towers — for fire safety, of course — that when a new building turns out to have an interesting staircase, it’s worth enjoying. You can read about what is almost certainly higher education’s most entertaining new staircase, at the California Institute of Technology’s Cahill Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, in the architecture issue of The Chronicle Review. (Don’t forget to check the slide show.) For comparison purposes, here are some best-staircase contenders from other eras and other campuses.

Looking down the Peabody staircase, a cast-iron confection in an 1866 building by Edmund Lind.

Several years ago, Peabody commissioned a renovation that brought a new and very social staircase to what had been an alley between two Lind buildings.

The U. of Pennsylvania’s 1891 fine-arts library, by Frank Furness, has a spectacular staircase that narrows precipitously as it rises within a vast brick tower.

Much plainer, but every bit as enjoyable, is this staircase in Louis Kahn’s 1953 Art Gallery at Yale U.

The recent Interdisciplinary Science and Technology Building 2 at Arizona State U., by Richard + Bauer Architecture, has staircases that all but bring Escher prints alive.

The Cahill Center, designed by Morphosis, has a staircase perfect for the astronomers and astrophysicists who work there. This is the staircase at the main level.

The space through which the staircase climbs is surrounded by a whole geometry’s worth of masses and voids. Far above, perfectly aligned with a viewing spot at the staircase’s base, is a skylight.