The pump room, night

At half past eleven the pump room is the quietest it gets. One pump idles while the other rests, the gauges have settled, and the tanks hold their heat for the morning. The caged bulbs stay on all night because this room never fully sleeps. Every so often a pipe ticks as it cools, the only sound beneath a sleeping building.

Below the welcome lounge is the room most visitors never see and every resident depends on. The pump room is concrete from floor to ceiling, lit by a row of caged bulbs, and the back wall is a map of the building's plumbing drawn in copper and steel. Pipes rise, bend, split and disappear into the ceiling toward every floor above.

On the left two teal pumps sit on concrete plinths, each with its own column of valves and fittings climbing the wall, and red valve wheels mark where the water can be shut off. In the middle a small steel vessel hangs among the gauges. On the right two tall stainless steel tanks hold hot water for the apartments, the restaurant and the studio, next to a red expansion vessel and a grey control panel with three green lights that should always stay green.

There is no furniture here and nothing to buy. This floor is in the tower because a building without one is only a picture of a building. When a tap opens in the apartment upstairs, something down here notices. When the restaurant's kettle fills at eight in the morning, a pump answers. The gauges are the closest thing the tower has to a pulse, and the pump room is the best place to understand how all the other floors keep working.

In the tower the pump room is the first basement, directly under the welcome lounge.