A staircase that comes full circle, By Edward Rapp

Everybody should have at least one spiral staircase in his life. Some people say that's one too many, but a caracol, as they are called here, is an adventure worth living. They are especially useful where house space is tight.

In France, designers have come up with handsome circular staircases in stone that require no central column. The steps wind around gracefully by simply building one on top of another all the way up, held together by good engineering and a little glue.

We got into the spiral staircase frame of mind when we built a Pedro Urquiza house. This architect features high ceilings; ours are seven meters high, compared to the more conventional three meters. This prompted the idea of building a balcony over part of the living room. But where to put the staircase to get to it? Urquiza said the stai1rcase, of necessity, had to be a circular one, so a circular one we ordered. It was the only way to get from one level to another without disturbing the symmetry of the house.

We traveled out to Lagos de Moreno, a small city known for its iron foundries. If you, like me, think of a foundry as a place like Bethlehem Steel, you would be way off track in Lagos. We asked the local citizens about foundries and they sent us on a wild goose chase down dusty lanes, until finally one kind gentleman got in the back seat of our car and led us to a cluster of rickety buildings, and he said triumphantly, "Here is your foundry." It is called Fundicion Ascencion D Cristo. As often happens in Mexico, there is comfort and solace from on high in the very name.

There were rusted ironworks in the yard. They looked like they had been there for 50 years, and we wondered if we were in the right place. But soon a foundryman appeared and our doubts receded. He took us over to study two sample spiral staircases, one considerably larger than the other. You can see the smaller one in tiny San Miguel shops where inventory is stored upstairs and space is at a premium. While that small caracol is difficult to maneuver, it takes up no more space than a telephone booth.

We settled on the larger size. The treads are 24 inches wide and you feel safe as you wind around, with the heavy center pole on one side and a nicely turned cast iron railing on the other. It does not quite have the comfortable feel of a well-made standard staircase, but as a smooth salesman might say, it gets you there.

We haggled briefly over the cost and compromised at 20,000 pesos. They grumbled and we grumbled, but both were content.

We peered inside the dingy, ramshackle buildings that are the casting rooms. There is no artificial lighting in there, and little natural light. The floor is in constant tumult because it is composed of re-used sand and clay.

That soil is constantly moved and shaped up for new molds. It is an unhappy-looking place, sort of what a medieval dungeon might look like. The pour, of course is the big moment, the culmination of all the design and setup work. The castings are then left to cool. If you wonder what happened to your old Ford, it quite possibly has been reincarnated as a cast-iron park bench.

Our staircase requires a four-inch steel pipe as the centerpiece of the caracol. Each stair tread has a four-inch sleeve on the inner side that fits over the central pipe, and there are bolt holes on the outer side for three banisters per tread.

The total weight of the 16-step staircase is 960 kilos. The castings are well done; they fit together well. Rather nice flourishes are built into the design to give the staircase a pleasant, finished look.

Our hosts at the foundry say that there is a competitor in Lagos who works fast and, we gather, is modernized and does more business, but our foundry defends itself on the grounds that the goal here is to preserve the established look of older castings. In short, we were buying style.

Our next consideration was to get the staircase to San Miguel. The delivery was included in the price, but that did not prevent our friends from handing us an outsize bill for gasoline for their truck. The bill would cover the cost of gasoline for a round trip to Montana, and Lagos is just a bit beyond León. In a choreographed give-and-take we compromised on that one, too. We thus became the proud owners of 104 pieces of cast iron staircase parts plus a couple of kilos of nuts, bolts and washers. The foundry people unloaded as fast as they could at our construction site and headed back to Lagos. We felt slighted because they knew their metier and we had to learn as we went along how to put together this new-fangled erector set. That's life in Mexico: You may come up with something good, but you learn as you go along.