Friday... full of good cheer
Step by step
You can race down to escape, walk slowly to make an entrance, run up a vertical marathon or flop down when you're tired.
- By Carolina D'Souza, Lifestyle Features Coordinator
- Published: 00:30 September 12, 2008
- Image Credit:
You can race down to escape, walk slowly to make an entrance, run up a vertical marathon or flop down when you're tired.
A stairway's functionality is delightfully open to
interpretation. As is its design.
Modern staircases have intriguing angles and shapes like circular, freestanding, cantilever or floating. But the reification of a futuristic design concept that looks perfect in 3D isn't always possible.
"Regardless of how crazy an idea, constructibility is integral," says Tomas Gulisek, principal of Burt Hill, a Dubai-based international architecture, engineering and interior design firm that designed MotorCity, an 858-acre development at the Dubai Autodrome.
Tomas says craftsmanship and physics of materials are critical factors to achieve functionality whereas ergonomics ensures comfort and safety.
The convenience of lifts and escalators, and by extension, their exploitation, has led us to believe that stairways have been assigned to utility areas and fire escapes.
Tomas refutes this assumption, and says, "Vertical transportation is still integral to building design.
In the past decade, technology, innovation, material and
execution have created exotic designs, but great ideas have always been there."
And though stairways follow established interior design movements, Tomas believes this can be restrictive. He disapproves of pigeonholed design philosophies like
minimalism and modernism. He says, "These don't exist anymore. Boxing a design is abuse for the things that are far apart in originality, quality and delivery."
– Carolina D'Souza, Lifestyle Features Coordinator, Friday
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