The book talks about the need for internationalization and the needs of CERN (acronym for Center Européen de la Recherche Nucléaire), an organization that occupies nine municipalities spread over Switzerland and France. The 774 project consists of a basement, ground floor and two upper floors and is intended for laboratories, management offices and the auditorium. Oriented towards the landscape, it is located in front of the CERN Control Center (CCC) and aims to become its landmark building. The version finally built starts from understanding the building as a series of superimposed volumes, in a singular interpretation of the CERN anagram. It was this anagram of circles and particles in all directions of space that inspired us to generate a central hole (the void of the porch is a metaphor for the void of matter) around which to establish the different wings in all directions (say space is, for an architect, say the plot that is available or the building to be rehabilitated, depending on the case). 

The project thus aims to reinterpret matter… Physicists work to discover its internal laws, but architects do too, although in a different way, since we work both with matter (the built element) and with the void (the resulting space)… And with the light, which ends up flooding everything… Silences, in music, are as important as sounds, because they will mark time … We must not forget that, as de la Sota said, if music is air that sounds, architecture is the air in which we live. In the same way that Max Planck established that electrons move around the nucleus in determined orbits and, only when they change their orbit, do they release energy, in the same way it happens when we go up and down stairs, changing floors, when walking through a building. The final form could have been this or many others, that is not so far from the orbitals that Niels Bohr advocated. Architecture is not only a game, but also a challenge (I discover that there is a play on words in French between, jeu and enjeu, between game and challenge, since this report was first written in French and, only later, translated into Spanish and to English)…