Architecture

If you not going to holiday for the entire month of August on a Greek island then the policy at CERN is that you must sweat until you change your mind. Building 40, where the ATLAS and CMS experimental offices center, has a beauty of a glass dome that turns to beast for 30 minutes every day as you are revealed, Indian Jones style, as the site of the lost ark. Fusion powered theatrical lighting is what we are talking about, in your face. And, the architectural trajectory is not a positive one: a new building, 42, adjoining and expanding on the offices of 40 deals with the heat like sawdust deals with vomit, soaking it up and becoming 100 times as gross.

Building 42 wedges itself on a hillside at the perimeter of CERN, gazing off toward incredible views of a horse training field and vineyards. Its brilliance is the wall of southwest facing windows that soak up the 1000 W/m^2 of bone softening heat from the afternoon sun.  This is a good plan in the winter, but the light bulb above your head wilts to a blob of silica and tungsten in the summer. We physicists put our money into high field gradient RF cavities, not air conditioning (at least in these parts). Those shades you see in the photo above operate automatically to prevent the building from technically killing anyone. But, when you are trying not to let your sweat short out your stock Dell keyboard which leaves black spots all over your desk from it’s molten rubber feet, are you really living?

Oh, and look, in the hall is our savior, the water cooler. (A substantial breeze of hot air expanding out into the hallway almost blows you here.) You are going to need at least a few glasses an hour to keep the salts in your blood from crystallizing as the afternoon heats up. But glasses you say? What is that? Such things don’t exist in this part of the world. The spring-loaded cup dispensers on every last one of these gray spigots are fully sprung. The are effectively upside-down water fountains.

Also, don’t even think about getting your own glass from the cafeteria, “IT IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN TO REMOVE CROCKERY, GLASSES OR CUTLERIES FROM THE RESTAURANT AREA.” OK, I’ll admit disposable cups are also available, but a 10 minute round trip just to acquire a disposable cup just doesn’t feel right.

Anyway, the heat is tappering off for the moment. Let’s hope the transition to mild autumn weather is a long and lingering one.