Introduction

MANY theories have been advanced in the past about the external staircase as a feature in the design of buildings. In practice, climatic conditions inevitably decide the type of design most suitable.

There is everything to be gained both for effect and for convenience by introducing a main stepped approach to the principal floor of a building directly from the street level or from a courtyard. This is largely a question of design in a specific building programme and admits of great variety of treatment. Classic architecture in England is prolific in examples of external approaches, which came into use in a minor way at the close of the seventeenth century (Fig. 16), but it was not till after about the year 1730 that they were freely introduced for buildings of large scale. Lord Burlington in his villa at Chiswick, near London, employed an elaborate stepped approach; George Dance, the Elder, contrived a double staircase at the extremities of the portico to the Mansion House, London (which has since been altered), and throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century many country mansions were given this distinctive feature. In the early part of the nineteenth century the ingenuity of William Wilkins, R.A., produced two unique designs for the National Gallery and University College, London, the one contained within the line of the projecting portico, and the other carried boldly beyond it: both are illustrated on the first Plate of this Series.

In the middle of the nineteenth century a novelty was introduced in the design of the Museum at Berlin where Schinkel devised an external staircase immediately within the open colonnade, and many years later this motive was followed by Poleart at the Palais de Justice, Brussels.