The World Needs More Staircases of Knowledge Like The University of Balamand in Lebanon

In a moment when Trump is just dumbling down America, it was so refreshing to find this image of 'The Staircase of Knowledge' located at the University of Balamand in Lebanon. Sasaki Architects explain the misson of the university and creates context around the staircase. 

The University of Balamand, established twenty years ago in the aftermath of the Lebanese civil war, occupies a spectacular site in North Lebanon on a steep hillside overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. Established by the Orthodox Church, the university is committed to promoting understanding between the Christian and Muslim faiths, and to developing a secular education based on dialogue, transparency, and resistance to dogma and fundamentalism. The university plans rapid expansion over the next twenty years to an enrollment of 5,000, drawing students from throughout the Middle East. Sasaki's master plan accommodates this expansion while reflecting the university's overall goals. A dominant theme of the plan is a Path of Learning that links the secular—expressed by an ancient stone-vaulted goat house restored as a faculty center at the upper end of the campus—to the spiritual, expressed by a thousand-year-old Orthodox monastery at the lower end of the campus.