A photograph that spirals: the celebrated oriel staircase of Chicago's Rookery Building — Burnham and Root's 1888 masterpiece, later polished by Frank Lloyd Wright — coiling down and away in a perfect nautilus of ironwork and stone. In silvery black-and-white it becomes pure architecture-as-music, a fugue you can fall into. Lifted by a champagne-gold leaf frame and a wide white mount, it carries the gravitas of the building itself. The eye is seized at the rim and sent spiralling inexorably inward, swept down through curl after curl of wrought iron toward a vanishing point that promises everything and shows nothing, so that the staircase becomes less a route between floors than a diagram of yearning itself — the human urge to descend, to deepen, to follow the curve all the way into the centre of the mystery. Light pools in the silvery treads like memory settling in the grooves of the mind, and the whole structure seems to breathe with the slow confidence of stone that knows it has outlived its architects. Crowned in champagne-gold leaf, it hangs not as a picture of a building but as a portrait of ambition learning, gracefully, to fall.
- Medium
- Photographic print
- Framing
- Super-cheap fake-gold frame
- Artwork size
- 400 mm × 380 mm
- Framed size
- 480 mm × 380 mm
