Design
The Eccentric Design and Cutting-Edge Science of Fermilab
The idiosyncratic design of a hub of Cold War physics research, the Fermi National Accelerator Lab in Illinois.
This essay is an excerpt from Midwest Architecture Journeys, edited by Zach Mortice, forthcoming October 15 from Belt Publishing.
I didn’t come to the prosaically named Silicon Detector building for its roof. I was there to look at some cutting-edge telescope technology, soon to be implemented at one of the world’s leading observatories. But here I was looking up at the interior of a funky squashed geodesic dome, constructed of triangles in muted reds, blues, and golds, like an electron micrograph of a virus built of stained glass by Buckminster Fuller.