The Rise and Rise of Risers: How the Humble Staircase Transformed Into a Third Space

In 1967, the architect Kevin Roche and his firm were tasked with creating a master plan for the Metropolitan Museum of Art to mark its centennial anniversary. In addition to refurbishing the museum’s many galleries, they replaced part of the original 1902 entrance with a grand, pyramid-like staircase that serves as a bridge from civilian life to cultural treasure, commonly called the Met Steps.

In the ensuing decades, this stepped urban plaza became a popular spot for students and tourists alike, ad-hoc performances, marriage proposals, and even a set piece for the original (and reboot) of Gossip Girl.

A few decades later, in 1999, Miuccia Prada asked Rem Koolhaas to rethink the retail space at her new store, which happened to be in the Guggenheim’s former Soho outpost. The result was an amphitheater staircase in the center of the shop, known as the Epicenter: a place where visitors could sit and chat without the obligation to buy a pair of shoes. Prada’s experiential steps are still a popular venue for talks, performances, and films. Nearby at Cooper Union, Thom Mayne of Morphosis designed a social staircase for the college. Connecting the art, architecture, and engineering programs is a vertical piazza. Wide steps that rise four stories through the skylit central atrium serve as both a main circulation route and informal seating for socializing and academic debate.

There has been a recent boom of social staircases in retail spaces, corporate headquarters, and university campuses because they represent a third space, an interstitial space, a flex space—all signifiers of an institution that focuses on engagement and serves the public in an informal manner. Museums are no exception. As museums diversify what they offer, tiered seating has become a crucial amenity of respite and a new way to program.

Here, we’re sharing a selection of our favorite social staircases at museums across the globe.

Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, 2006, by Diller Scofidio + Renfro

When DS+R designed the ICA Boston, located on the city’s harbor, they flipped the script. Upending expectations of a monumental stairway at the front of the building, the steps are at the back facing the waterfront. The tiered wooden planks help with flow, rising to the museum’s second floor, where the outdoor terrace floor extends into the auditorium with its own raked seating. The cantilevered top floor spans 80 feet beyond the building’s footprint and provides a roof for year-round use, including a free summer concert series that features artists from Berklee College of Music.

Pérez Art Museum Miami, 2013, and M+ Museum, Hong Kong, 2021, by Herzog & de Meuron

Herzog & de Meuron have created social staircases for two museums they’ve designed: the Pérez Art Museum and the M+ Museum. In Miami, the architects eliminated the hermetic auditorium space, creating a double set of oak stairs that serve as both a lecture area and a casual living room humming with activity.

In Hong Kong’s West Kowloon Cultural District, M+ Museum’s grand staircase bridges the civic and the cultural. The industrial concrete steps deposit visitors into the central atrium, which serves as a navigational hub to the galleries. Here, the amphitheater seating looks out to Victoria Harbor. These free zones are a community asset, carving out public space within museum real estate.

Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing, 2014, by Dong Yugan

The Red Brick Art Museum, designed by architect Dong Yugan in the city’s International Art District, is a work of art in itself. Commissioned by local art collectors Yan Shijie and Cao Mei, the 180,000-square-foot compound of galleries and gardens is clad almost exclusively in red and gray brick. A popular feature is the central sunken courtyard ringed by stepped seating in various playful formations of brick masonry. A large skylight bathes the informal auditorium and open-air gallery, while a circular balcony affords views of ongoing performances, talks, and the occasional fashion show.

Design Museum, London, 2016,  John Pawson

In November 2016, when London’s Design Museum reopened in the 1960s building that formerly housed the Commonwealth Institute, there were plenty of opinions. The critics thought John Pawson’s hushed minimalist interior lacked character. Today, the museum has tripled its annual attendance with record-breaking numbers for solo shows featuring Tim Burton and Stanley Kubrick. The central oak staircase, outfitted with leather-padded seating, features generous landings that create balconies and gallery hallways in the cathedral-like space. In this setting, the social staircase suggests, as Shakespeare wrote, that “all the world’s a stage.”

Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City, 2025, by Adjaye Associates

The brownstone stoop is so ingrained in Harlem’s cultural heritage that the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture runs Stoop Stories, a project chronicling what happens on these mythologized steps. So it was no surprise that when the Studio Museum in Harlem reopened after an eight-year renovation, a reverse stoop raked downward to a lower level. The welcoming wooden structure is part of the free lobby and connects the local community to the museum’s robust programming. It served as a backdrop for a 2025 Vanity Fair photo shoot celebrating Black artists, as well as a gathering spot for the museum’s popular summer series featuring DJs and musicians. This social staircase is audacious architecture at its best.