Hidden away in a building at the Rochester Institute of Technology is a little-known marvel called the "Escherian Stairwell." It seems to defy the laws of physics, because when you walk up it, you arrive back at the same place where you started. Don't believe me? Just watch this video from RIT's "Can You Imagine" series in which it was featured.
Okay, so maybe the Escherian Stairwell is not a real thing. The real story here is that the video about it was created by Michael Lacanilao as an attempt to create a "modern myth." To get people believing that something impossible (such as an infinite loop stairwell) could actually exist.
Lacanilao hoped to expand the video into an even longer documentary about Rafael Nelson Aboganda, the (fictitious) architect who supposedly designed the stairwell. He ran a
KickStarter campaign last year to raise funding for this project, but unfortunately the campaign didn't reach its funding goal.
But we still have the "Can You Imagine" video, and apparently it's fooled quite a few people since being uploaded to YouTube. Linda Besner,
writing for Hazlitt, reports that, "[Lacanilao] had thought that people would see the video and be taken in for a maximum of 15 seconds before rational thought set in. Over the summer, he was taken aback by the flood of pilgrims showing up demanding to see the stairwell. “One couple was really, really angry. She told us that during her trip with her boyfriend they were arguing in the car about who would do the stairwell first. And they were both kind of scared like, 'No, you do it first, No, I don’t know if I want to do it first.'"
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