Every stair is a proposition about how fast you should move. A riser of 150 millimetres with a tread of 330 says: take your time, this is a place. A riser of 190 with a tread of 250 says: get up there, this is a route. Architects know this and mostly pretend they do not, because the stair is where the building’s manners show, and manners are hard to defend in a client meeting.1Footnote 1: Swiss norm SIA 358 permits a wide range; the building code only fixes the outer limits. Everything inside those limits is rhetoric.
Consider the dog-leg stair, the most common type in the country, two flights and a half-landing. It is efficient and it is also an argument: that you should turn around halfway up, that the journey has a middle, that you will be seen from above before you arrive. A straight flight makes the opposite case. It says the destination is visible from the start and you may as well commit.
The landing is where the argument gets interesting. A landing that is exactly the width of the flight is a pause for breath. A landing that is twice the width is a room, and rooms on stairs are where buildings become social. The old Zürich apartment houses understood this: their landings held a window, a bench, often a plant, and the neighbour you meet there is the neighbour you know.2Footnote 2: Nineteenth-century tenement stairs in the Kreis 4 district commonly have landings of 1.8 by 2.4 metres, larger than some of the kitchens they serve.
Then there is the question of the handrail, which is the stair’s only honest contact with the hand. A rail of round steel, 40 millimetres, is the correct diameter for a grip; everything else is a surface. Timber rails are warmer and wear in. Concrete upstands pretending to be rails are a confession that nobody imagined a hand.
We have, as a profession, spent the last thirty years making stairs photogenic. Floating treads, glass balustrades, stairs that become bleachers that become seating that become branding. Most of these are miserable to climb. The tread is too deep for a step and too shallow for a seat; the absence of a riser lets you see the drop; the rail is a sheet of glass you cannot hold.3Footnote 3: A 2024 survey of office stairs in Zürich found that in buildings with a prominent feature stair, lift use between adjacent floors was higher, not lower.
The stair worth drawing is the one that argues gently. Low risers, deep treads, a rail you can close your hand around, a landing with somewhere to put a bag down. It is an argument that you have a body, that the body is tired sometimes, and that the building has noticed. There is no photograph of this stair that would impress anyone. There is a knee, forty years from now, that will be grateful.