A fight about stairs could reshape American cities

Michael Eliason was an undergraduate studying architecture at Virginia Tech University when he went to live for a year in Germany. While interning in Freiburg in 2003, he worked on projects including apartment buildings four or five stories tall. After returning to the US and graduating, Eliason began his architecture career in Seattle, where he soon noticed that all the buildings he worked on kept getting “bigger and bigger.” It felt to him “like the exact opposite of my experience working in Germany.”Reviewing his portfolio years later, Eliason noticed a stark contrast: All the US apartment buildings were massive and ..