Designing Mindful Classrooms
This is what the students at Bentleigh Secondary College, a publicly funded junior high and high school in Melbourne, Australia, do every day in the school’s new Meditation and Indigenous Cultural Centre (M&ICC). The college teamed up with an eco-friendly architecture firm dwpsuters, which is the Australian arm of design worldwide partnership (dwp). Regular classes on meditation, indigenous culture, and environmental sustainability are taught at the center. The inside is designed to be conducive to meditation, “using calming forms and materials” such as rounded columns of polished wood, says Nick Cini, the center’s designer....