Buildings for Real Places
If you head southwest from Denver on Highway 9, you’ll eventually nd yourself in Garo, Colorado. It’s where the road and sky meet, with mountains in the distance. Bu alo Peaks Ranch is nearby. Established in 1863, it’s one of the oldest ranches in the state. A perfect place for connecting students with nature.
This is one of the places Ekaterini “Kat” Vlahos takes her students. She teaches architecture at the University of Colorado in Denver, and she believes that instilling in her students a sense of the land, as well as the traditions of the people who settled there, makes for better, more conscious design.
First, she asks her students to choose a spot. They sit and sketch for ve minutes. Then they walk the site. They’re o by themselves, not talking to each other.
“They’re doing a kind of walking meditation; they’re engrossed in the place,” says Vlahos. “Then I have them come back to the same site an hour later, and I say, ‘I want you to sit and sketch and observe what’s changed.’”
Vlahos has her students do this several times during their site visits because even if all they’ve noticed is a change in the light, it’s valuable. “If you start at nine in the morning and finish at three in the afternoon, the position of the sun is vastly di erent,” she says. “To be able to pick up on those things, and the nuances of the environment, is critical. We do that by sitting quietly and observing.”
Back in the classroom, the students discuss what they experienced. “Many of them want to go back multiple times,” Vlahos says. “They come up with ideas and they’ll say, ‘I need to go back and make sure I’m making the right decisions here. Am I being mindful of the impact I’m going to have on the people who will use what we’re planning to build?’”
The result, says Vlahos, is “architecture that is sensitive and appropriate for that place.” Her students will become architects who know how to take people into account. They will also know how buildings interact with the landscape.
Vlahos, 53, comes from a long line of Greek immigrants who worked the land. She was born and raised in Colorado but architecture took her to
Los Angeles and Baltimore, where she helped design large urban buildings. Wanting to be back in the landscape that nurtured her, she came home to Colorado.
“Students become much more mindful about their proposals and actions because they’re tied to an actual place.”
Since she returned in the mid-’90s, she’s seen how much rural land is being consumed by development, with more than three million acres slated to be developed in the next 10 years.
“Development for me is not a negative if it’s done well,” she says, “if it takes into account the region, the weather, those very basic things.”
Vlahos decided that teach- ing architecture was the best way to ensure that future construction would take these fundamental elements into account. She’s also the director of the school’s Center of Pres- ervation Research, where they assemble documentation and analyze historic sites.
“I reconnect to everyday, ordinary places for inspira- tion,” she says. “For example, I found in these old ranches the buildings would be sided beautifully to maximize solar gain. They really understood the environment.”
Her students help repur- pose older structures for clients. Recently, a couple wanted to nd a new home for their 30,000-volume library of historic books. That home will be the renovated Bu alo Peaks Ranch.
Vlahos will guide her students through the design and preservation processes, how the ranch buildings will change in order to house books rather than livestock. “I use historic sites as a teaching tool,” she says.
“We try to understand what is there, to really observe. What I find is that the students become much more mindful about their proposals and actions because they’re tied to an actual place. We’re solving real problems for real people in real places.”
At NASA’s Langley Research
Center in Hampton, Virginia, 3,800 employees work on future technologies—every- thing from a new launch-abort system for space capsules to developing technologies for aircra to y at hypersonic speed to studying the Earth’s atmosphere in order to better understand global climate change.
High-stress, cutting-edge work, indeed. It’s no surprise, then, that for Langley’s best and brightest, health and wellness is important—now including mindfulness meditation.
That’s where Mike Verano comes in. He’s a psychotherapist and longtime student of mindfulness, and for the past two years he’s been leading a popular weekly mindfulness meditation class at Langley.
“Sometimes 30 people show up,” says Verano. “People are advertising it through word of mouth, saying, ‘You have to go check this out.’” Verano also meets with NASA sta ers on balancing work/life needs, from family concerns and financial affairs to substance abuse and stress. His monthly lunch-and-learns tend to include mindfulness elements, too, regardless of the topic.
“Ultimately, NASA looks at health and wellness from the perspective that a healthy employee is going to provide a much better product for the government,” says Randy Cone, the occupational health contracting officer at Langley. “It’s about self-maintenance of the mind and the body.”
Working with that mandate, Verano has been invited to talk about mindfulness at other NASA facilities. He’s been to Wallops Flight Facility in Vir- ginia to talk about stress man- agement, with mindfulness a central part of the training. This spring, he presented Launch- ing a Mindfulness Practice at the NASA Occupational Health Conference held at Kennedy Space Center.
As for the future, Verano says he’s happy to travel any- where to share information or teach a class for NASA. Well, almost anywhere.
“I’ll probably stop short of actually going up into space, but right up until the launch pad, I’m there.”
Aetna Brings Mindfulness to Work
Mark Bertolini is Ceo of aetna, the third-largest health insurance provider in the United States, and he knows rsthand what mindfulness can do.
Nine years ago a skiing accident le Bertolini with a broken neck and plenty of prescriptions for pain medication. He cred- its mindfulness with helping him heal. “The biggest breakthroughs in man- aging my pain occurred as a result of
the meditative practice,” he told Mindful. “Learning new ways to think about the pain and new ways to control it had huge impacts on my ability to manage it.”
Inspired by such personal experience, the leadership at Aetna is now working to increase access to meditation instruction. The company has rolled out Mindful- ness at Work—a regular 12-week, online meditation program—to Aetna sta and to commercial customers who pay for their employees’ health insurance claims and use Aetna for administrative and other services.
The program is aimed at minimizing work-related stress and improving work- life balance. It was designed in collaboration with the Duke University Center for Integrative Medicine and eMindful Inc., a provider of online programs that focus on mind-body wellness.
When Vivienne Harr was eight, her parents showed her a photo of two young boys in Nepal carrying large rocks strapped to their backs. “I didn’t even know slavery existed before I saw that photo,” says Vivienne, now nine.
From that point on, she and her family decided they would dedicate themselves to the cause of ending child slavery. They started last summer with a single lemonade stand, but by harnessing the power of social media, they raised more than $100,000 in six months for Not For Sale, a nonprofit aimed at halting human trafficking.
To date, $1 million has been raised to expand into bottling their “lemon-aid.” And Make a Stand Inc., the “for-pro t social purpose company,” will donate half the pro ts to organizations working to eliminate slavery.
“It’s Vivienne’s dream to end slavery within her lifetime,” her mom, Alexandra Harr, told Mindful. Others have noticed her daughter’s e orts, too— Vivienne spoke at Wisdom 2.0 in February, a conference that attracts leaders in technol- ogy and social change, was recently lmed for a documen- tary, and has been invited to visit the White House.
Vivienne attends Marin Mindfulness, a cooperative in Marin County, California, that teaches mindfulness to teachers, parents, children, and teenagers. Children take on service projects such as baking cookies to raise money for an orphanage, growing vegetables for a food bank, and making signs to encourage the use of bicycles. Children o en team up to support one another, practicing mindfulness in the process and experiencing how it feels to serve others and take positive action.
Helping children feel they are part of the solution to the world’s problems can keep them from feeling overwhelmed, says Lesley Grant, founder and director of Marin Mindfulness. “A lot of jadedness comes from being exposed to so much without having a way to help. Giving them a way to respond, in a way that suits their development, is incredibly healing for them.”
And Vivienne agrees. “I just feel like you don’t have to be someone big to help. You can be anyone—like me.”
Minding Your Health
Dial-up meditations are now available to employees at Harvard and MIT. 4-CALM is a phone line from Healthy Harvard’s new Mindfulness at Work program. It o ers three- and four-minute guided meditations, plus other resources and re ections to help manage stress. MIT