Social Workout

Take the Stairs

Architects Suddenly Hot for Fitness

New Cooper Union (Via Iwan Baan-NYTimes.)

Elevators out. Stairwells in. In case you missed the "Fit Building" memo, the cool kid architects are lately mixing some fitness in with their aesthetics. Notabable and noted examples include Renzo Piano's still-relatively-new New York Times Building, wherein the stairwells are on the edge of the building, encased in glass, and feature spectacular views of, well, the Port Authority. But you get the point. “I had no idea until recently how many regulatory agencies are working against the notion of fitness in buildings,” said starchitect Bruce Fowle -- who also worked on The Times building -- to Metropolis. An even fresher example is the New Cooper Union building in Manhattan, designed by Thom Mayne. "The social heart of the building is a vast internal staircase, which sweeps from the lobby all the way to the fourth floor." writes Nicolai Ourousoff in The Times. 

Clearly, this is a promising trend, and one that the medical establishment has now officially blessed: Writing in the Southern Medical Journal, a husband-wife research team -- one architect and one doctor -- has declared that rethinking the treatment of staircases in modern American architecture could help solve the country's obesity problem. Their carefully researched point: If the average staircase were, for example, not horrificially ugly, without air conditioning or windows, and vaguely convenient, people might use them. Sounds plausible.