Horse Ramp Stair

The building occupied by PVS was a former riding school. Studio 1 and 2 made up the parade with studio 3 as the stable. The site of the stair was the former ramp from the parade to the stable. The building has undergone many ad hoc changes to adapt it to a photography studio and the ramp no longer ran its full stretch from the ground to the stable. Studio three as a result was only accessed via a small spiral stair from studio 1 with the ramp functioning as a fire escape. The new stairway provides a larger dedicated assess to Studio 3 bypassing studio 1.

In the initial design stages the stair was conceived as a light floating element that appears to hover within the space. The compressed/false-perspectival geometry of the ramp gives a simple drama to the site – the stair needed to fill the width entirely to play upon this feature. Functional need for robustness led to the idea of folded steel, morphing the lightness of the initial concepts into a more elemental rippling steel carpet. Gaps between elements and perforations within the treads themselves give glimpses of the ramp below. At night the stair is lit from below as well as LED strips beneath the handrails.

Constructing the stair in steel required precision in the design drawings and an attitude to tolerance that allowed for walls to change in their relationship to the stair as you move along it. Elements and junctions were tested before the stair was put into production. Assembly on site was a week.

Photography by Fonard Milann