Heroes: "Stairway to Nowhere"

SPOTTED: The in-your-face orange double-helix geometries of Herbert Bayer's sculpture "Double Ascension" (originally called "Stairway to Nowhere") at Los Angeles's Arco Plaza Towers, a rendezvous point in recent episodes of the countdown-to-doomsday saga "Heroes." This sculpture's also appeared in numerous commercials and, reportedly, "Pretty Woman."

WHAT CAUGHT OUR EYE: This sculpture embodies Heroes' central question: Are our strangely gifted heroes taking us up, up, up to victory and salvation--or down, down, down into Sylar's evil apocalypse? And the orange too: What does it mean? Is it the sun rising on a new, beautiful day--or nuclear holocaust? Tune in Monday ....

GET IT: You can't! It's too big. But you can learn about Bauhaus, reductive minimalism, typography and architecture in Herbert Bayer: Painter, Designer, Architect, $79.98.


Photo by Dave Bullock at eecue.com