Where the Building Stops Performing

Every building has a face it shows you and a back it doesn’t. The face is the part that was designed — the lobby with its considered lighting, the reception desk, the lift with its polished doors and its little chime, the corridors dressed up to be walked along. And then there is the other part, the part you find when you push through the door marked with the running green figure: the stairwell.

It is a different country in there. The finish stops at the threshold. Bare concrete stairs, painted with a grey non-slip that has worn through at the nose of each step to the aggregate beneath. Steel handrails, cold, functional, bolted on. Block walls or breeze block, painted the cheapest serviceable colour, scuffed at shoulder height where a thousand bags and elbows have passed. Pipes run exposed up the corner. A fire hose sits coiled in its glass box. The lighting is whatever throws the most lumens for the least money, humming faintly, and the acoustics are hard and bare, so your own footsteps come back at you flat and close, and a door slamming three floors up arrives like a gunshot.

No one designed this to be dwelt in. That is the whole character of it. The stairwell exists to be passed through — in an emergency, or by the people who keep the building running, or by those of us who take the stairs to avoid the lift and find ourselves, for a few flights, in the honest back-of-house of a place that everywhere else is trying to impress us. Here it stops trying. Here there is no performance, no considered palette, no attempt to make you feel anything at all except that you should keep moving to the floor you want.

And I confess a real fondness for these spaces, precisely because they have given up on charming me. There is a rest in them. Everywhere else the building is working on you — the shop wants you to buy, the office wants you to feel productive and important, the hotel wants you to feel indulged — and the stairwell wants nothing, sells nothing, flatters nothing. It is the plumbing of the place made walkable. It shows you the concrete the building is actually made of, the structure under the story, the truth beneath the finish. You can stand on a landing between floors, in that hard flat light with the pipes and the fire hose and the worn grey steps, and be, for a moment, in a part of the world that is not trying to be liked.

They are the same everywhere, more or less, and for the same reason services stations are: no one spent the money to make them individual, because no one was meant to notice them. So they share a smell — cold concrete, a hint of cigarette from someone who slipped in for a quiet one, dust, sometimes the ghost of paint. They share the sound, that bare hard echo. They share the fire door with its heavy closer and its bar you push and its sign about keeping it shut. They are the unloved connective tissue of every large building, the corridors between the rooms that matter, kept plain because plainness was all they were ever asked for.

I take the stairs when I can. Partly the legs. But partly for this — the few flights spent in the part of the building that isn’t performing, where the finish falls away and the structure shows, and for ninety seconds I am moving through the honest grey bones of a place that everywhere else has dressed itself up, and asks, in here, for nothing at all.