Staircases That Lead To… Nowhere

Throughout the time humans have inhabited the planet, they have built many unique structures and achieved many incredible feats of engineering. One of these feats was the invention of the staircase. Throughout the staircase’s history it has been a way for people to move up in life and get to where they need to go. Unfortunately, not everything lasts forever and over time, many staircases have lost their strength or function.

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There are staircases that are thousands of years old, carved into rocks; ones that were once used before losing their connection to a building; and stairs that just don’t make sense at all. Here is a short collection of abandoned staircases that were photographed around the world. They are, indeed, staircases that lead to nowhere.

Stairway on a house. Offenbach Marktplatz, Frankfurt, Germany.

Alcatraz, San Francisco, CA.

Staircase of a demolished house. Looks like a dinosaur. Columbus, Ohio, US.

‘Winding stairs’ monument by Rudi van de Winton, dedicated to those who lost their lives in a 1977 air disaster. Tenerife, Spain.

Staircase sculpture at the KPMG Building in Munich, by Olafur Eliasson, entitled ‘Rewriting’.

Ancient stairs carved into rock. Petra, Jordan.

‘Crouching Tiger and Turtle, Magic Mountain’, by sculptors Ulrich Genth and Heike Mutter in Duisburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.

An old brewhouse, Philadelphia, US.

Boston, Massachusetts, US.

Stairs on the bank of the River Danube. Budapest, Hungary.

Michel De Broin’s mind bending sculpture: ‘Révolutions’. Parc Maisonneuve-Cartier, Montreal, Canada.

Center of the World, Felicity, California (salvaged from the Eiffel Tower in 1989).

via gizmodo