Locating all offices outside the laboratory environment allows for a safer workspace where food can be consumed, quiet work can be done, and more paper and books can be stored. Locating the office zone very close to or adjacent to the laboratory for easy access and communication is desirable.
Depending on the location of the laboratory building, there may be requirements for bringing the entire building up to current building codes and standards once a certain percentage of the building is under renovation. These code requirements may include fire protection systems, accessibility, plumbing, ventilation, alarm systems, chemical storage restrictions, and egress issues.
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Thermal oxidizers and incinerators are extremely expensive to purchase, install, operate, and maintain. However, they are one of the most effective methods of handling toxic and etiologic agents. The operational aspects of these devices are beyond the scope of this book. Also, their application to chemical hoods has historically been rare. When considering this method of pollution control, call an expert for assistance.
A laboratory must be properly decommissioned prior to changing its use. Among other steps, decommissioning entails decontamination and the removal of hazards to ensure the safety of future occupants and others who may enter the space. Decommissioning must be done prior to renovation, even if the space is to be reused as a laboratory. Because laboratory operations differ, it is appropriate to decommission a laboratory whenever there is a significant change in occupancy. Areas outside of the laboratory, such as ventilation ductwork, coldrooms, hallway freezers and common storage areas, should also be decommissioned if they are concurrently subject to a significant change in use or occupancy. Decommissioning must also be done prior to the demolition of a laboratory.
Be sure to document the assessment, decontamination and removal activities, and to issue a final clearance statement. A Laboratory Closeout Checklist is included on the disc that accompanies this book. It may be appropriate to prepare a written Decommissioning Plan.
The first step in laboratory decommissioning is to assess any hazards that may remain in the space. Review the known or likely historic uses of the space, as well as records of spills and accidents, laboratory manuals and notebooks, and published papers of research conducted in the lab. Ask former occupants what hazardous materials they used and if they know of any contaminated areas.
Mercury is used in most laboratories, and mercury spills are common. Unless it is certain that no mercury was used, laboratory decommissioning should include testing of floors, sinks, cupboards, and molding around furniture and walls. Be sure to check and clean sink p-traps. Visual inspection alone is inadequate as historic spills may reach beneath floor tiles and furniture, and behind walls. As described in the ANSI Laboratory Decommissioning Standard, modern mercury testing utilizes a portable atomic absorption spectrophotometer with a sensitivity of 2 ng/m3. Decommissioning clearance levels consider the U.S. Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry's Minimal Risk Level (MRL) of 200 ng/m3 for non-occupationally exposed individuals. Chapter 6, section 6.C.10.8, includes information on dealing with mercury contamination. Additional mercury testing may be necessary as furniture, floors, walls, and plumbing are removed during renovation.
Final tests or survey results can be used to verify decontamination. In some cases regulatory authorities allow permanent marking of a porous floor or wall where a radioactive material or chemical has penetrated deeply, and destructive removal is impractical prior to the building's demolition. When removal, decontamination, and cleaning meet planned decommissioning standards, a final area clearance statement can be issued, and renovation, demolition, or the new occupancy can commence.
The capricious ravine of streets did not cut this block of houses into too disproportionate slices. The forty-two colleges were scattered about in a fairly equal manner, and there were some everywhere. The amusingly varied crests of these beautiful edifices were the product of the same art as the simple roofs which they overshot, and were, actually, only a multiplication of the square or the cube of the same geometrical figure. Hence they complicated the whole effect, without disturbing it; completed, without overloading it. Geometry is harmony. Some fine mansions here and there made magnificent outlines against the picturesque attics of the left bank. The house of Nevers, the house of Rome, the house of Reims, which have disappeared; the Hôtel de Cluny, which still exists, for the consolation of the artist, and whose tower was so stupidly deprived of its crown a few years ago. Close to Cluny, that Roman palace, with fine round arches, were once the hot baths of Julian. There were a great many abbeys, of a beauty more devout, of a grandeur more solemn than the mansions, but not less beautiful, not less grand. Those which first caught the eye were the Bernardins, with their three bell towers; Sainte-Geneviève, whose square tower, which still exists, makes us regret the rest; the Sorbonne, half college, half monastery, of which so admirable a nave survives; the fine quadrilateral cloister of the Mathurins; its neighbor, the cloister of Saint-Benoît, within whose walls they have had time to cobble up a theatre, between the seventh and eighth editions of this book; the Cordeliers, with their three enormous adjacent gables; the Augustins, whose graceful spire formed, after the Tour de Nesle, the second denticulation on this side of Paris, starting from the west. The colleges, which are, in fact, the intermediate ring between the cloister and the world, hold the middle position in the monumental series between the hotels and the abbeys, with a severity full of elegance, sculpture less giddy than the palaces, an architecture less severe than the convents. Unfortunately, hardly anything remains of these monuments, where Gothic art combined with so just a balance, richness and economy. The churches (and they were numerous and splendid in the University, and they were graded there also in all the ages of architecture, from the round arches of Saint-Julian to the pointed arches of Saint-Séverin), the churches dominated the whole; and, like one harmony more in this mass of harmonies, they pierced in quick succession the multiple open work of the gables with slashed spires, with open-work bell towers, with slender pinnacles, whose line was also only a magnificent exaggeration of the acute angle of the roofs.
There, plunged more deeply than ever in his dear books, which he quitted only to run for an hour to the fief of Moulin, this mixture of learning and austerity, so rare at his age, had promptly acquired for him the respect and admiration of the monastery. From the cloister, his reputation as a learned man had passed to the people, among whom it had changed a little, a frequent occurrence at that time, into reputation as a sorcerer.
In fact, from the origin of things down to the fifteenth century of the Christian era, inclusive, architecture is the great book of humanity, the principal expression of man in his different stages of development, either as a force or as an intelligence.
The generating idea, the word, was not only at the foundation of all these edifices, but also in the form. The temple of Solomon, for example, was not alone the binding of the holy book; it was the holy book itself. On each one of its concentric walls, the priests could read the word translated and manifested to the eye, and thus they followed its transformations from sanctuary to sanctuary, until they seized it in its last tabernacle, under its most concrete form, which still belonged to architecture: the arch. Thus the word was enclosed in an edifice, but its image was upon its envelope, like the human form on the coffin of a mummy.
Thus, during the first six thousand years of the world, from the most immemorial pagoda of Hindustan, to the cathedral of Cologne, architecture was the great handwriting of the human race. And this is so true, that not only every religious symbol, but every human thought, has its page and its monument in that immense book.
Thus, down to the time of Gutenberg, architecture is the principal writing, the universal writing. In that granite book, begun by the Orient, continued by Greek and Roman antiquity, the Middle Ages wrote the last page. Moreover, this phenomenon of an architecture of the people following an architecture of caste, which we have just been observing in the Middle Ages, is reproduced with every analogous movement in the human intelligence at the other great epochs of history. Thus, in order to enunciate here only summarily, a law which it would require volumes to develop: in the high Orient, the cradle of primitive times, after Hindoo architecture came Phœnician architecture, that opulent mother of Arabian architecture; in antiquity, after Egyptian architecture, of which Etruscan style and cyclopean monuments are but one variety, came Greek architecture (of which the Roman style is only a continuation), surcharged with the Carthaginian dome; in modern times, after Romanesque architecture came Gothic architecture. And by separating there three series into their component parts, we shall find in the three eldest sisters, Hindoo architecture, Egyptian architecture, Romanesque architecture, the same symbol; that is to say, theocracy, caste, unity, dogma, myth, God: and for the three younger sisters, Phœnician architecture, Greek architecture, Gothic architecture, whatever, nevertheless, may be the diversity of form inherent in their nature, the same signification also; that is to say, liberty, the people, man.
The general characteristics of all theocratic architecture are immutability, horror of progress, the preservation of traditional lines, the consecration of the primitive types, the constant bending of all the forms of men and of nature to the incomprehensible caprices of the symbol. These are dark books, which the initiated alone understand how to decipher. Moreover, every form, every deformity even, has there a sense which renders it inviolable. Do not ask of Hindoo, Egyptian, Romanesque masonry to reform their design, or to improve their statuary. Every attempt at perfecting is an impiety to them. In these architectures it seems as though the rigidity of the dogma had spread over the stone like a sort of second petrifaction. The general characteristics of popular masonry, on the contrary, are progress, originality, opulence, perpetual movement. They are already sufficiently detached from religion to think of their beauty, to take care of it, to correct without relaxation their parure of statues or arabesques. They are of the age. They have something human, which they mingle incessantly with the divine symbol under which they still produce. Hence, edifices comprehensible to every soul, to every intelligence, to every imagination, symbolical still, but as easy to understand as nature. Between theocratic architecture and this there is the difference that lies between a sacred language and a vulgar language, between hieroglyphics and art, between Solomon and Phidias. 2ff7e9595c
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