Staircases

We don't think enough about staircases.

Nothing was more beautiful in old houses than the staircases. Nothing is uglier, colder, more hostile,
meaner, in today's apartment buildings.

We should learn to live more on staircases. But how?

- Georges Perec from Espècies d'espaces

The stairs that wrap the crevices of this enourmous monolith were born from
the obsession of a man to reach its top. Luis Villegas López a farmer from the
town of guatape borrowed a 8 meter ladder from the town priest and
accompanied by two friends they set to climb the rock using the ladder and
sticks that were fixed against the rock’s walls. After 4 days of unsuccessful
attempts they finally reached the top in the 5 day and went boasting happily
into the village about their feat.

After this Luis will buy the land surrounding the monolith and convert it into a
park to attract visitors. He built against every engineer’s advice a large
stairwell in the same way he had originally climbed the rock, by using the
crevices and geological faults in the monoliths surface and going through
them like a doctor stitching an open wound.

Luis Villegas was not the only man fascinated with this monolith, various
persons had tried unsuccessfully to climb it before and the task was
considered unattainable, the rock was also subject of a quarrel as the two
towns that bordered it “Guatape” and “El Peñol” fought over it’s ownership to
the point where some people from the town of Guatape tried to draw the
town’s name on it, only managing to get the letter G and part of the letter U.
But why are large monolith’s so fascinating? Do they represent some large
aspiration? Is it a fascination to conquer the unattainable? Is it a will to
merge with the surrounding space? Or a seduction in the process of self-
mastery and self becoming?

Are crevices and open views related to each other? Crevice Spiders are a
family of spiders with a hundred different species that build their webs
between cracks and crevices that they find in nature and houses. Their webs
don’t have the adhesive power of other spider webs but their messy design
works to trap their prey. Crevice spiders built their webs the same way that
Luis Villegas built his staircase by dancing spontaneously against the walls
between a dark crevice that attracts the spider’s prey.