The sitar is a plucked string instrument. It has been used throughout the Indian subcontinent for many centuries.

Sitar is traditionally said to have been invented by the Sufi singer Amir Khosrow.

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⬇︎Live of OMA playing Hip-hop covers

00:04 C.R.E.A.M 02:21 Shook Ones, Part II 04:32 Footsteps in the Dark 07:03 Rapp Snitch Knishes

OMA is a Hip-hop band from Manchester, UK. 🇬🇧

STEPPING UP

Following the Bilbao effect, the museum became the glamour commission for architects, the program that appeared to offer the greatest formal freedom, cultural cachet, and popular recognition. That might be less true today, twenty-five years later, as attention shifts to supertalls, data centers, and outer space.

Or, perhaps the museum stair is the new glamour program? Three recent high-profile museum projects in New York City would support this. Just look at the new wings at the The Frick Collection (by Selldorf Architects) and the New Museum (by OMA), and the new Studio Museum building (by Adjaye Associates). Rather than tousling with the displays, each organizes conventional galleries around a monumental staircase, which becomes foundational to the museum-going experience. In a city as space-starved as ours, it's a bold move giving over so much square feet and attention to circulation, and to staircases that don't serve egress needs. (In addition to these ornamental staircases, each buildings is required to have two enclosed fire egress stairs.) And these staircases are not entirely pleasant, especially considering that the very young, very old, differently-abled, tired, and just plain lazy will never use them. I'm able-bodied and sure-footed, and visiting the New Museum after a long day at the office, the stairs nearly wiped me out.

The staircases at the Frick and the Studio Museum are conventionally planed "U"-stairs rendered in vivid, sensual materials. All surfaces of the Frick stair, including ceilings, are clad in a mottled blue Breccia stone, and the Studio Museum stair in a specked blue-grey terrazzo. Both stairs are cantilevered, which only emphasizes their masonry bulk, making them feel even heavier than they are. And their proportions are flattened. One walks up without any sense of rising, of ever leaving the floor. These stairs just never take off. At the Studio Museum a giant column supporting the first landing, clad (expertly) in the same travertine, is visible right away from the entrance, confusing the effect.

The stair at the New Museum works differently. Built from coiling, irregular. triangular runs, clad in light industrial materials (punctured aluminum plate and brushed steel), with plain concrete treads and high guardrails, it somehow feels lighter and also more lighthearted. Though unapologetic in bulk and ambition, it offers as sense of transformation and progress as one ascends, pausing to drink in the glorious views straight down Prince Street from the landings. As one climbs they feel that they're heading somewhere; the stair promises delight, or at least some art. From the outside, the stair tower gives the museum a gleaming new image; it's a beacon on Bowery. Inside, the it takes up as much space on each floor as the galleries. Years on, as the collection grows, will this gambit feel correct?

One wonders if today's stair-making starchitects are haunted by Marcel Breuer's iconic stair at the 1966 Whitney Museum. Though enclosed, tucked away in a corner, and rendered at a smaller, intimate scale than the galleries, it shapes an unforgettable experience -- a slow, quiet, shadowed passage from the ground floor lobby to each gallery, a kind of intellectural palette cleanser, with controlled views over Madison Avenue. It gives relief and contrast, and delivers one clearly to exhibits. If museum architects today are suffering anxieties of influence about it, they might look at it once again, closely.