The Missing Stair
?The missing stair is a metaphor for a person within a social group who many people know is untrustworthy or otherwise has to be "managed," but around whom the group chooses to work by discreetly warning newcomers of their behaviour, rather than address them and their behaviour openly. The "missing stair" in the metaphor refers to a dangerous structural fault, such as a missing step in a staircase; a fault that people may become used to and quietly accepting of, is not openly signposted or fixed, and that newcomers to a social group are warned about discreetly.??
?It is not often that architecture engages with a missing stair, unless it is part of the detail; a part purposefully forgotten to serve as a lesson to its user. This has come to light in the analysis of the Jewish Museum in Berlin; a serious city with both serious architecture and architects, and a population rife with criticism. This issue is about the soul; not of this museum per se, but a conversation that has been extended through the fields of education. It was very much the talking point of the classical tradition within the arts, but modernism as eschewed it with such force that people no longer know what to say.
?Well, the stair is not forgotten; the stair exists in the museum; its last eight steps leading to a white wall. But it is within the drawings of the architect Daniel Libeskind, that the last eight steps of his linear flight that are missing, aptly named the Sackler Staircase after the family’s donation.
?For an architect that takes the road through study and has assimilated the intensity of Libeskind’s work, the missing stair is a sign greater than that which this museum is proposed to support. Undoubtedly this museum’s language has been adapted from its neighbouring Berlin Wall, but this missing stair now draws attention to a much smaller one, built by the architect. It moves the consequences of Jewish history to before its foundation and illuminates an egypto-mythology of the false door, where these doors served as an imaginary passage between the world of the living and the world of the dead, and were believed to allow the Ka (an element of the soul) to pass through them; undoubtedly where these eight last steps are leading to.
To be honest the existing stair looks like an afterthought; perhaps a result of not having to contend with the planners, that would have been flummoxed by its ‘functionality’. But as much as this museum was conceived on music sheet paper, the score continues. Most of us were flabbergasted by the apparent plagiarism of the museum plan to establish the National Museum of Australia in Canberra, in a manner to bring aboriginal history in line with Jewish, but to be honest this is a bum steer. There is far more music in attempting to guide the interpretation of the soul with architecture and I would hope Daniel and his colleagues would be in full agreement, after all our collective hardships.