FRENZY STAIR
Sepide Elmi
ARCHITECTS
Sepide Elmi
CONSTRUCTION & SUPERVISION
Aslan Fotouhi
STRUCTURAL ENGINEER
Farshad Aghajani, Davood Hajibabayi
BUILDER
Ali Khazaee
STAIR CONSTRUCTION
Dime
CLIENT
Bistoon Tile
MANUFACTURER
Dime
DESIGN TEAM
Salar Keshavarz, Hamed Kamalzadeh, Omid Golshan, Kosar Ghafoorinezhad, Sahar Nouri, Parham Ghaderi
PHOTOGRAPHS
Parham Taghioff, Persia Photography Center
AREA
2000 m²
YEAR
2025
LOCATION
Karaj, Iran
CATEGORY
Housing, Apartments
English description provided by the architects.
The wall can be a compressed memory, a condensed memory of the process through which a mental wall is materialized.
Through its very presence, it operates as a mechanism of visibility and invisibility. Walls are sometimes mental and sometimes physical, but in all cases, they are powerful.
They possess the power to conceal and to reveal bodies, objects, and cities. The distinction between public and private life profoundly shapes behavior, clothing, and even the movements of the bodies.
In Iran, the division between public and private space is not merely spatial; in recent decades, it has been reduced to a two-dimensional surface. Everyday life unfolds across a threshold where gestures and movements are continuously adjusted and restrained.
The body, particularly the female body, becomes a site of negotiation: invisible and controlled in public. Within this context, the staircase has remained an overlooked architectural element, confined, enclosed, and reduced to a neutral device of circulation.
It is typically buried within the core of residential buildings, detached from the facade, and removed from any form of visibility. People linger, wait, think, remember. They become quiet witnesses to the unspoken choreography of daily life.
Frenzy Stair begins from this contradiction. I believe staircases hold an immense, often overlooked potential, especially within residential contexts, and even more so in artist residencies such as this project.
Beyond their conventional role as circulation elements, stairs can operate as open platforms for a wide range of activities. They can be skated on, exercised on, and performed on.
They can host dance, informal gatherings, or moments of pause.
In this sense, the staircase becomes not just a connector between floors, but a flexible, inhabitable structure, capable of accommodating diverse bodily practices.
The stair can transform into a shared ground for experimentation.
Rather than being a passive architectural element, the staircase becomes an active field, one that supports movement, expression, and dialogue between public and private.
The project liberates the staircase from its enclosure, displacing it from the interior core toward the façade. What was once hidden circulation becomes visible action.
Ascending and descending are no longer purely functional gestures; they are reconfigured as performative acts.
The body, previously regulated and concealed, enters a space of partial exposure, neither fully public nor entirely private. This in-between condition creates a new spatial and social threshold.
As part of an artist residency, Frenzy Stair also engages with practices that are often restricted from public expression.
Activities such as dancing or simply inhabiting the body freely remain situated within the private domain, yet are subtly staged toward the outside.
The project does not force visibility, but constructs the conditions for it to emerge.
In this sense, the stairs act as a mediator, a stage, and a living archive of movement. It records the tension between control and expression, concealment and presence.
Frenzy Stair is a labyrinth that has escaped its habitual confinement, becoming a performative space that stages everyday life.
Moving from the center toward the facade, the stair occupies the threshold between the public and the private, transforming the facade that often reduced to a two-dimensional surface, into a stage for dialogue with the public realm.
The Stage functions as an in-between world for speculation, a condition in formation that nevertheless requires another form of action in order to become. This project is part of a broader studio research on performative architecture and the role of the wall as the conditions of seeing and being seen.
