Design
Green Spaces That Actually Calm the Mind and Body
After 20 years of creating retreats from the stress of urban living, the TKF Foundation has an intuitive sense of what makes them work.
After 20 years of creating green spaces where people can retreat from the stresses of urban living, Tom Stoner and his colleagues at the TKF Foundation have developed an intuitive sense of what makes such a place work.
Through a program called Nature Sacred, TKF has built dozens of temporary green refuges from the stresses of modern life, mostly in the Washington-Baltimore area. They do it at universities, in tough inner-city neighborhoods, in hospitals, and in prisons. The foundation has collected some 20,000 written comments from journals stashed under the benches in these oases.