Customer Reviews

Vertical Lift, Elevator, Paternoster: A Cultural History of Vertical Transport

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This is a collection of essays and illustrations concerning vertical transport in buildings, principally the elevator. The best way of describing it is to list the topics of the various essays: By my count, there are 13 pages on the history of elevators, 3 pages on notions of ascension in religious tradition, 3 pages on the ridiculous notion of connecting orbiting satelites to the surface of the earth by elevators to accomodate sightseers(!), 20 pages on the elevator in art and literature, 10 pages on the elevator in film, 2 pages on engineering aspects of elevator control, 7 pages on escalators, and 7 pages on paternosters. Obviously, this is quite a mish-mash of essays that are only tangentially related to each other. The entire book has 144 pages, with most of the rest given over to photographs, which seem to have been chosen for eye appeal rather than for explanatory value.

This last section on paternosters was the most interesting, and had information that would be hard to find anywhere else. A paternoster is an endless chain running from top to bottom of a building; imagine a vertical conveyer belt. Attached to this belt or chain are numerous elevator cabs. The belt moves at a slow but constant rate of speed without ever stopping, and the numerous elevator cabs move up and down through the building. There are no protective doors; users jump on and off at will. The paternoster seems to have been limited to Europe, and even there it's becoming obsolete due to the safety problems.

The book was designed to be arty and has a pretentious air about it. The 9 by 13 inch format is awkward. Especially irritating is that photo captions and footnotes are vertical on the page, at right angles to the words of the essays. It looks like a clever approach to graphic design until you actually start to read it. As noted above, there are a huge number of full-page photos, which add to the book's aesthetic flair but are not always the best use of page space.

How does one categorize such a book? It defies pigeonholing. For the person interested in this esoteric topic of architectural history, it may be worth a look, but there are certainly shortcomings as well.