Abstract:

Stairs were first used by people to raise their shelters in order to protect them from the dangers on the ground and to provide them access to things at high altitudes. In later periods, people built temples that were raised with steps to reach God (or what they considered sacred) and to show their power. Initially built with limited materials and simple forms, the staircase gained different shapes and textures with the use of reinforced concrete and steel after the industrial period. This building element, which has a very important place in the discipline of architecture, has always been intertwined with the cultural, religious and linguistic structure of the society. For this reason, staircase has semantic, symbolic and psychological sub-identities alongside its function. Sometimes it was a monument that was placed in the memory of a society and sometimes it was an art object depicting the most important thought of an artwork. And in architecture, stairs define the space, affect the space and even form the space. Thus they have gone beyond being a building element. In this study, the symbolic, aesthetic, artistic, monumental, experimental and multifunctional characteristics of the stairs are emphasized through examples and an alternative classification to the existing classifications in the literature is proposed.

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