Staircases are not what comes to mind when one thinks of Cambridge. No, Cambridge is all about grand facades, arches, chapels, gates, dining halls. Identified by a letter (‘x staircase’), in college language the staircase is synonymous with a familiar ‘place’: a student bedroom, a teacher’s office – the vertical arrangement of college life, yet hardly the epicentre of its daily unraveling. It is an interstitial space, a passageway to the private, a means to an end. But in some occasions it may become the true focus of its occupants’ flamboyant life: think of the role of stairs connecting various rooms around the courtyard of the Architecture Department, on the evening of an Arc Soc party.

A junction between the old and the new, these concrete treads are encased in a glass cabinet, allowing those walking up and down to gaze over the party crowd in the terrace while they are being watched in motion from outside, as if performing on screen. Walter Benjamin described this ‘subtle dominance’ of the staircase in a note about its symbolic function at the Paris opera house in the 1930s – a place that overshadowed the actual performance hall. High society ladies displayed their fashion and gentlemen met for a casual smoke; this social life of the staircase was what opera was really about.

A more obvious divide between form and (perceived) function can be seen, ironically, in some of the structures that are more exposed to the public eye. Take for instance the Raised Faculty Building staircases on the Sidgwick Site. Seen by everyone walking under these buildings, but rarely used, these beautiful precast concrete staircases are a great example of early 60s modernist style. Their materiality is pushed to the fore of our perception, stripped of unnecessary frills, positioned inbetween the concrete pillars that hold together the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages. The Cripps Building staircases at St John’s are an even more surprising discovery: away from the college’s neo-gothic chapel, these Grade II listed structures are far from a tourist attraction. Integrated in an open piloti, they lead to a complex of student rooms, part of an ambitious development project completed in 1967. Their clear geometric form almost disappears into the building’s vast body, an invisible space in which anything could be hidden.

We can see in these elegant constructions that lie underneath the city’s landscape a sense of alienated modernity. Past symbols of technological progress, optimism and anti-aestheticism, remain today in the shadow of Cambridge’s ancient architecture; their time seems to have never come. Perhaps it is time to reclaim them, appropriate and fit them to our new urban dreams.