Cloud Stairs | 云梯
This modern concrete incense holder (or incense burner) is part of a series where we try to imagine the essential elements of architecture buried in our collective unconsciousness, comprised of stairs, platforms and towers that recall a place familiar but distant at the same time. This is an architectural folly in miniature, a monument to some forgotten event.
First in the Cloud series of burners, Cloud Stairs is comprised of two gold colored houses connected by a staircase that cradles the backflow incense’s plume as it descends from the top. The meandering fog creeps and overflows as it pleases to create a dreamlike scene. In addition to the stairs, there is also a plume waterfall on one side that spills onto a long platform ending in a cliff edge.
Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument.
-Adolf Loos, 1910 Architecture