Stairways to Heaven : THE STAIRCASE: Volume I: History and Theories; Volume II: Studies of Hazards, Falls and Safer Design <i> By John Templer</i> , <i> (The MIT Press: Vol. I, $27.50, 185 pp. illustrated; Vol. II, $32.50, 200 pp. illustrated; two-volume set, $55) </i>

My wife doesn’t like elevators. When we go on errands involving just a few floors, we’ll frequently take the stairs. Nowadays, this often means stepping through an anonymous portal into a bleak zone that exudes all the charm of a prison cell. There’s a fair chance that the door to the floor we want will be locked. The familiar staircase, once a highly visible, symbolically meaningful, sometimes even grand organizer of human space and motion, has been rapidly relegated to a merely functional role. It has become as peripheral to design philosophy, and as hidden, as a building’s plumbing or air conditioning.

Though at root staircases have always been the most utilitarian of architectural elements, they have been imbued often enough in the past with great beauty and pageantry. The vast sea of steps leading up to Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, for example, or the exquisite, spiraling Tulip Staircase in Queen’s House, Greenwich, or the double-horseshoe approaches to Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, are supreme examples of the ways in which stairs can theatricalize spatial relationships and heighten our passages, whether from room to room or from realm to realm.

In a pioneering two-volume treatise, John Templer, Regents’ Professor of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, has adopted what he terms a “holistic” approach to his subject. He wants us to be able to see a staircase in all its contexts, as “art object, structural idea, manifestation of pomp and manners, behavioral setting, controller of our gait, political icon, legal prescription (and) poetic fancy.” Since Templer also is an expert on the design aspects of accidental injury, he devotes a great deal of attention as well (most of one volume, in fact) to stairs as “the locus of an epidemic of cruel and injurious falls.”

Templer actually covers even more territory than this, since additionally he considers, if only briefly, the uses of stairs as amplifiers of primitive labor, as scientific vantage points, as religious retreats and symbolic elevations, and as strategic military devices. Such a synoptic view has its problems. Because the subject is treated typologically, rather than chronologically, the reader can feel shuffled about from period to period and place to place; but in the main the author’s style, like that of a brilliant tour guide, strikes a balance between significant detail and the need to keep moving right along.

In Templer’s typology the archetypal staircase is the “straight flight.” Interestingly, this form appears at the dawn of history in both primitive and highly evolved examples. On the one hand we have the notched logs and simplified ladders of tribal cultures; they are found in neolithic remains and are still in use today. These primarily provide access to dwellings raised for protection from floods, animals or intruders. On the other hand, there are the vast, still-mysterious pyramids of Egypt and Central America. Their steep, straight-flight sides are not designed to facilitate climbing but, in a sense, to retard it, thus slowing and heightening the visibility of ritual priestly ascents.

From the Parthenon to the Pompidou Center, from Genoese palazzi to New York brownstones, Templer shows us the huge variety of simple straight-flight staircases, and alerts our eye to how their meanings are mingled, whether they derive from ritual concerns, practicality or the desire to please the senses.

The familiar “helical” stair (also called the spiral, the oval, the belfry and the turret stair; the vice, the St. Giles screw, the caracole, turnpike, corkscrew and ascensorium) has been known since Biblical times. Because of the comparative difficulty of its construction, it didn’t come into wide use until the rise of the medieval craft guilds.

Helicals, too, were from the first employed in both defensive and religious arenas. In castles they could be designed to disorient the enemy and favor the sword-hands of the occupants. In cathedrals, aside from their symbolic appeal, they were practical in that they could mount to great heights without eating up a lot of floorspace. As they became fashionable signs of wealth and power, they were often moved to the outsides of buildings, and parts of their walls were cut away for visibility, as in the Kilianskirche at Heilbronn, and the four helicals of the cathedral at Strasbourg.

“Composite” stairs, the final type in Templer’s analysis, is a catch-all category encompassing a vast variety of elaborations. Here the basic form is the “dogleg,” the back-and-forth-with-a-landing style familiar from school buildings. Many hybrid types are detailed here, but the culmination of the composite staircase, indeed the apotheosis of human movement itself, rests in the astonishing baroque imperial style.

Inspired by Renaissance garden architecture, which visually integrated various landscape features through an overall design of terraces, steps and cascades, the imperial stair is truly a “stairway to heaven.” A look at the grand staircase at Wurzburg Palace reminds us of how much our sense of self has changed. Auden put it best: “No unearned income / can buy us back the gait and gestures / to manage a baroque staircase.”

“History and Theories” can be easily enjoyed by the general reader. “Studies of Hazards, Falls, and Safer Design,” with its equations, flow charts, tables, and far fewer illustrations, is, though quite readable, rather more technical and primarily intended for practicing architects and engineers. It’s an up-to-the-minute summation of everything known about stair safety, and includes design recommendations. Its detailed focus on areas ranging from human territoriality to handrail finishes, from the coefficient of friction to owner liability, may be too much for the casual reader.

However, anyone reading either of these volumes will never be able to look at staircases in the same way again. By learning the history of stairs, we appreciate the rich vocabulary possible in their design and bemoan its absence in our era. By learning about safe stair construction, we come to understand how astonishingly little attention has been paid to this subject in the thousands of years staircases have been built, and we see the results all around us.

If our public spaces are to encourage our sense of self-worth, community and citizenship; if our private dwellings are to be more than merely machines for living, then books like this pair will undoubtedly form part of our re-education.