Earlier this week, Dezeen ran a story about a clean and modern house; a house where the living spaces cantilevered off of stacked bedrooms like a grown-up, contemporary treehouse. The views from the so-called Tower House are incredible and the architects responsible for the projects are the ones at Gluck+. I poked around the firm’s website a bit and found that the Tower House has a sort of cousin built in the New York: the Vertical Library. Although one house is rural and the other urban, both are organized around something simple and humble: a staircase. More than just circulation, the stairs become exciting and dynamic places in these projects. In the city, the stair climbs a four-story bookshelf, and in the trees, the stair is painted bright yellow.