Many of Cern's scientists are well aware of the connection between their great underground temple and those of religions, ancient and modern. And, just as the quest for God, or the gods, encouraged the very first great works of architecture, so Cern, laid out up to 100 metres below ground like some inverted, latter day Stonehenge, has been constructed on a massive scale.

The enormous constructions at Cern evoke great cathedrals and Egyptian pyramids, says Jonathan Glancey. Paradoxically, this extreme expression of modern science may be the most spritual structure of our time.

The huge underground complex of Cern is almost entirely hidden from sight. The presence of this wonder of the modern world is, to say the least, muted. Most of its buildings are matter-of-fact industrial sheds or concrete bunkers with none of the obvious allure or artistry of the Great Pyramid of Cheops, the Parthenon, Chartres Cathedral or the Eiffel Tower.

And yet here is a place of mystery and imagination, as well as mathematics, physics and imaginative engineering, that promises to take us on a journey into the realm of the spiritual as well as the purely scientific and rational. In this sense, Cern is a modern equivalent of the great temples and cathedrals of the past. It aims to find the point at which creation began.

God only knows what scientists will divine in the months to come. Will the origin and structure of the universe prove to be the product of some divine being, a colossal figment of our own imagination, a mirror of some parallel universe, or a quintessence of stardust, ultimately unknowable and incomprehensible, even as we hold it in the palm of our hands?

Ultimately, Cern's scientists may come up against a truly mysterious nothingness - the very opposite of solid architecture - and discover that perhaps we cannot ever truly understand or come to terms with the elusive core and generator of the universe.

This, by the way, is a part of the reason, although expressed very differently, why the Temple of Jerusalem, one of the great buildings of legend and religious faith, was based around a physical emptiness, incomprehensible to the worldly Romans who destroyed the great building in AD80. The temple, as latterly rebuilt by Herod the Great, might have been a mighty structure of stone, marble and cedar, yet its Holy of Holies, the shrine known only to high priests, contained nothing material or tangible whatsoever. What it did house, though, was the silent spirit of God.

Many of Cern's scientists are well aware of the connection between their great underground temple and those of religions, ancient and modern. And, just as the quest for God, or the gods, encouraged the very first great works of architecture, so Cern, laid out up to 100 metres below ground like some inverted, latter day Stonehenge, has been constructed on a massive scale.

The 3,000 scientists, technicians and other staff who work here, and the 6,500 particle physicists from at least 80 countries who visit Cern each year, are like some modern and global priesthood, the guardians of a place of hoped-for revelation that will divine the secrets of the universe and, perhaps, reveal the face of its creator.

If this sounds fanciful, you might well change your mind after a visit to Cern. At the heart of this vast operation, straddling the Swiss-French border near Geneva, is the Large Hadron Collider, housed in an underground ring that may seem little more than a long, curving, concrete-lined tunnel, much like the eastwards stretch of London Underground's Jubilee Line, but its purpose, and the machines that serve it, are sensational - mind-blowing, even.

One of the LHC's detectors - Atlas - weighs as much as 100 Boeing 747s. Looking like a cross between some improbably big communications satellite and the largest electric dynamo you can imagine, Atlas is the work of 1,900 scientists drawn from 164 universities in 35 countries. A true giant among machines, it fully deserves its name.

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©Cern
The ATLAS detector, part of the Large Hadron Collider.

A number of Europe's great medieval cathedrals were built in something like this same spirit. Teams of architects, masons, experts in geometry and Latin-speaking divines travelled across the continent gathering and sharing knowledge and raising immense, intricate and daring structures aimed at bringing humankind and the infinite together.

Their most profound works, and especially Chartres, are aligned with the constellations, as if they had been built as observatories, but with prayer rather than radio waves beaming into infinite, and numinous, space.

Back on the surface, our most ambitious contemporary buildings, whether in Europe or the rest of the world, tend to be vast office and hotel towers. Cities and states vie with one another to reach ever higher into the sky. None of these braggadocio designs, however, have any purpose beyond getting and spending. None has anything like the spiritual charge of a Sumerian Ziggurat, an Egyptian pyramid or a medieval cathedral, nor the sheer sense of wonder engendered by pure engineering marvels, whether the late 19th century Eiffel Tower or the early 21st century Viaduc de Millau over the River Tarn in the Massif Central.

No matter how odd it might seem at first, the most profoundly spiritual structure of our time, housed for the most part in functional sheds and unadorned underground passageways, is the vast Cern laboratory, tucked away out of sight, although very much in mind.

Here is a temple of our own age, a place and space where we will have a chance of understanding a little more of the Great Architect and the universe, or universes, he set blazing into perpetual motion.

· For more pictures of Cern click here