RISE AND FALL

The stairwell is the spine of a house. Everything passes through it, people meet in it, and it is what makes a building whole. It is the place every resident crosses daily and almost no one really looks at. RISE AND FALL turns to these spaces, which carry the character of a place like nothing else.

Hardly any two old stairwells are alike. Banisters, treads, materials, the light falling from above: each has a hand of its own, the ambition of a client, the craft of a joiner, the taste of a period. Some are strict and straight, others turn like a thought. And time has carried them all on, in worn steps, in cracks, in the sheen that countless hands leave on a handrail.

A stairwell is movement cast into form. It shows where people were going: up to the flats, down into the day. Now it is empty and the movement remains only as memory. You stand at the bottom, look up and think you hear footsteps that died away decades ago.

Rise and fall, coming and going, beginning and end. Hardly any other place holds these opposites so easily. A staircase has no direction of its own, it runs both ways. What was one person's way up was another's last way out.

RISE AND FALL turns a place of passage into an image of change itself and finds in it a beauty that only silence gives up: the beauty of a form that stays complete even when its purpose is gone.