I am a frequent stair user. Since I live on the third floor, it makes sense that I’d favour stairs over the elevator to go up or down a single floor. Even when I was assigned to live on the seventh floor by a stroke of bad luck, I’d make a conscious effort to take the stairs down.
The stairs between floors on the residential buildings on campus, however, aren’t as neatly designed and pretty as the stairs between the ground floor and the Highline. Like many multi-floor residential buildings, they rely on practicality to squeeze as many rooms as possible with the space they have, so stairs end up becoming stairwells.
Though they may not be the peak of stair aesthetics, they have a charm of practicality around them. When walking through them alone, these stairwells never fail to remind me of Julio Cortázar’s short text Instructions on How to Climb a Staircase, where he describes the steps necessary to reach the top of a staircase. Namely, one takes one foot and places it on the first step, then takes the other foot —which, although different, shares the same name— and put it on the step above, repeating until you reach the top.
The stairwells, however, are hardly empty. With the to-and-fro of students going and coming to class, the stairwells can become quite busy. In such situations, visual communication is key to getting through. Architects, in their search for more room space, forgot to make the stairs wide enough to fit two people. This isn’t a problem for when multiple people go in the same direction at the same time. All you need to solve that is a line. The issue lies in the clash between someone going up and someone going down. Normally, one would walk down the middle of the stairs so as to avoid uncomfortably brushing against the wall or the railing. When met with someone going the other way, however, a quick adjustment is necessary. The rules of courtesy don’t apply here, since apparently everybody has a different idea of what “courtesy” means when it comes to stairs. Some people keep walking down the middle and expect the other party to change the orientation of their body and squish over to the side to make space for Royalty Passing Through. Others are more considerate and pick a side. Others are even more considerate and do a non-verbal agreement so both parties turn their shoulders 90 degrees and squish on the wall so both sides can go without any trouble. The more interesting interaction, however, is when both sides walk normally and pick sides. I always assume, given how much of our lives we have sacrificed to cars, that picking the side where cars drive (which is, in most cases, the right side) would be the logical solution. My logic, however, doesn’t seem to stretch beyond a few people. The majority of my encounters have always relied on some form of non-verbal negotiation where both parties have to awkwardly snake around until one side decides what side to pick and the other can adapt. Once a side is picked, that decision must be respected, as breaking the unspoken contract would result in a crash. Although not as catastrophic or life-dangering as a car crash, it is, nonetheless, annoying and pointless to go through it when it is so easily avoidable.
In conclusion, stairs are adequate tools for vertical movement when alone. When met with someone else, they breed interactions centred on spatial negotiation and unspoken contracts that must be upheld if all is to go smoothly.