SPACES OF SERENITY Small Projects for Meditation & Contemplation

Spaces of Serenity: Small Projects for Meditation & Contemplation features six projects by architect and professor Jeffery S. Poss, FAIA. With each project informed by the landscape that surrounds it, a contemplative space is created that is simultaneously at balance with both nature and occupant.
Each structural environment is designed with careful precision and thoughtfulness, not as an escape, but as a temporary space of solace and quiet reflection. Natural materials and light fill these spaces, enveloping the meditator with their surroundings, giving them a serene space to reflect their state of mind. Through structures that mirror and support mindfulness, architectural design creatively contributes to the search for balance living in the everyday world.

In Thoreauvian fashion, Poss' deliberate spaces demonstrate through carefully orchestrated built form, filtered sensory input, and attention to human scale, how physical and meditative space can elegantly coexist with nature to positively affect one's emotional state.

Jeffery S. Poss, FAIA, is a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. A master's degree in architecture from the same university in 1980 was followed with practice through Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo & Associates, and Tai Soo Kim Partners. With its focus on identifying rising talent with non-traditional proposals, the Van Alen Institute Fellowship has supported Poss as he has traveled throughout Europe expanding the conventional definitions of public architecture.

At Urbana-Champaign and through his critical design practice, his teaching and work have focused on the development of concept, materials, and detail into architectural design, including design-build structures, furniture design, and the exploration of whole-to-part relationships in architecture, for which he received the AIA Education Honors Award.