Rachel Whiteread’s Staircase (2001) transforms an overlooked architectural fragment into sculptural monument. Using her signature casting process, Whiteread filled the void beneath a flight of stairs, creating a solid negative in resin and plaster. What was once transitional space — a passage between levels — is frozen, mute, and re-presented as object.

Scale is inverted. A functional element of the everyday, designed to be climbed without thought, is monumentalized into a singular sculpture. The work denies movement and purpose; the staircase is no longer a path but a block, heavy with presence.

Representation here works paradoxically: by casting absence, Whiteread makes the invisible visible. The resulting form is simultaneously familiar and estranging — at once a memory of use and an abstract mass. Ambiguity thrives: is this a ruin, a relic, or a ghost of circulation?

Materiality underscores the transformation. Fragile surfaces once touched by footsteps are replaced with dense, opaque solidity. The work insists that space itself can be treated as matter, and that architecture can be both document and monument.

Within a Gesamtkunstwerk frame, Staircase unifies function, memory, and form into a coherent language. It is not simply sculpture, not purely architecture, but an artifact of lived experience cast into permanence. In Whiteread’s hands, absence becomes the material of culture.