Lifted

Lifts might not have changed everything, but they changed a lot, according to Andreas Berard’s Lifted: A Cultural History of the Elevator.

The TLS reviewer observes how the elevator transformed architecture, and the class distribution of vertical space: “The lift allowed the dramatic recalibration of building types. Staircases were reduced to mere fire escapes while the piano nobile or bel étage lost its exclusivity. The best rooms in nineteenth-century European hotels and apartment buildings were on the second floor, while servants or the poor lived under the rafters. But the lift changed these taxonomies dramatically as the attic became the penthouse.”

It contributed mightily to the “poetics of modernity”: “Novels and films throughout the twentieth century, and into the twentyfirst, have capitalized on the lift as the site of life-changing interactions, emplotments often based on the statistically unlikely possibility of the elevator getting stuck between floors. Here Bernard offers an engaging digression on the elevator as “secular confessional”, drawing parallels between St Charles Borromeo’s Instructiones fabricate et supellectilis ecclesiasticate (1577) and Nora Ephron’s film You’ve Got Mail (1998).”