Library Staircase

The following is a wide-sweeping generalisation.

Modern public buildings are listless, limp, insipid shadows of their counterparts built in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. There are exceptions (try hard, you’ll think of somewhere) but they probably won’t overwhelm you with their majesty and richness.

Today’s picture was taken inside a building that we stumbled upon while looking for a flashy department store in Boston (part of the eternal quest for the perfect handbag – not for me, you understand, I’d be forever leaving it somewhere). We never found the store but we did find a library and some dramatic lighting.

Staircases come very high on my list of photogenic images. As a lighting designer I can never resist the temptation to shine a lamp down one, picking out the treads and leaving shadowy risers and a rim-lit villain, wreathed in smoke, collar up, photons glinting off the metallic blue barrel of his (or her) gun. Maybe add a child in a pram, bumping out of control down to oblivion – no, sorry, that would be going too far.

We only spent a little time here, just enough to admire some murals by John Singer Sargent (who incidentally spent some time painting in my home village of Fladbury in the late 1800s), the statues and the marbled walls. Now just imagine what it would look like in cost-cutting oak veneer, plastic and concrete.

With a glass-fibre lion.