The Laboratory was not merely a building; it was an ultimatum of gray stone raised against the Saxon sky.
While Göttingen slept beneath its timber-framed houses of oak and red-tiled roofs, Francisco's structure stood like a fragment of the future embedded in the heart of the eighteenth century. There was no trace of the organic warmth of German architecture here. Instead, a blind, monolithic mass of Roman cement rose from the ground—a slurry of volcanic ash and quicklime that seemed to swallow the pale northern light rather than reflect it.
To the left stood the rotunda dedicated to Catalina and her so-called "harem" of calculators.
