Lluis Miralles, head of the Site Management and Buildings Department, Jose Miguel Jimenez, head of the Technology Department, Roberto Losito, head of the Engineering Department, and Simon Baird, head of the Occupational Health and Safety and Environmental Protection Unit, officially laid the foundation stone of Building 311 during a ceremony on Thursday, 22 September.

Situated beside the water tower, the building will house a magnetic measurement laboratory for the Technology Department. With a floor space of around 1400 square metres, it will comprise a main hall for testing magnets on the ground floor and a mezzanine with offices on the first floor. Work began in April and the main construction (walls and roof) should be finished in May 2017, with the completed building ready at the end of the year. Just to make things more interesting, because of the building’s proximity to the tunnel of the old Intersecting Storage Rings (ISR) accelerator, the designers had to anchor it in the ground using tilted piles.