As employers adapt to remote work, the biggest question facing them is what to do with their physical offices. Even before the pandemic, many employers had begun questioning the wisdom of open-plan offices, which became popular in the past two decades. With employees seated in close quarters side by side and sharing kitchens and break areas, the offices enabled constant distractions. Once the pandemic hit, they also proved potentially lethal. Now, many companies are questioning the worth of offices at all. Tech companies, including Twitter, Facebook and Shopify, have said they will let many employees work from home permanently. Pinterest paid $89.5 million to cancel a new planned office space in San Francisco, saying more of its employees were going to work remotely in the future. But going fully remote carries its own set of problems.

       New employees and those in search of mentorship will have a hard time at a company if they’ve never met their colleagues in person； if people can’t chat often with colleagues, they trust them less, according to a study from business school professors at Columbia and Northwestern Universities. Remote work can also deal a blow to employees’ mental health； when Ctrip, a Chinese company, let more than 100 employees work from home for four days a week starting in 2010, they were happy for three months, but within nine months, about half wanted to return to the office, according to a study.

       That’s why some business owners are still investing in offices； they are just building a different kind of office. John Sweeden, who runs a small software firm in Oklahoma, broke ground last month on a new office building on a 25-acre plot. The complex is on land that costs a whole lot less than real estate in a crowded city center. Though it’s an office space, much of it will be “a place where zero work gets done,” he says. There will be a large salon for socializing； employees will be encouraged to spend hours there, talking about anything.

       A Native-American sweat lodge is a ceremonial sweat bath that typically has its roots in Native-American history and culture. Traditionally, it is a purifying ritual that uses intense heat to stimulate vision and insight. A sweat lodge ceremony helps detoxify the body by stimulating blood circulation and causing you to sweat out impurities. You are typically naked or wrapped in a towel.

       A traditional Native American sweat lodge is dome-shaped and built low to the ground. Rocks are heated up in a fire outside the lodge and then brought into the center of the lodge with a shovel and placed in a dug pit. More rocks are brought in, traditionally in four rounds, and the sweat lodge gets progressively hotter. The person in charge of the ceremony “pours the water” and is responsible for the health and well-being of participants. Typically, there are 8 to 12 participants, but there can be as many as a few dozen. Pouring water on the rocks creates steam, which makes the Native American sweat lodge feel even hotter. Sweet grass or sage is scattered on the rocks. You might be smudged with sage smoke before entering the sweat lodge to aid with the ritual of purification. It is usual to offer up prayers, share your thoughts with others, and ask for the release of pain and suffering.

       The sweat ceremony is intended as a spiritual reunion with the creator and a respectful connection to the earth itself as much as it is meant for purging toxins out of the physical body. The ceremony is believed to free the mind of distractions, offering clarity (mental healing)； to allow for introspection and connection to the planet and the spiritual world (spiritual healing)； and to provide antibacterial and wound-healing benefits (physical healing).

       On September 11th, 2001, tragedy struck the city of New York when terrorists crashed airplanes into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan. From the ashes of those iconic buildings, however, would rise a new city landmark – the glimmering One World Trade Center.                      Construction on 1 WTC began in April of 2006, but it wasn’t until May of 2015 that the doors were finally open to the public. This was due to the numerous challenges facing architects, engineers, and construction crews while they worked on the project. First and foremost were the cleanup efforts in and around the area where the twin towers came down. This is the site that would come to be known as Ground Zero. This alone took eight long months.

     After the cleanup, architects and engineers had to put their heads together to determine how they would make this new structure fit in with the infrastructure that was already in place. Beneath the site there were already train and subway tracks to take into consideration, all at different depths. To make things even more complicated, construction of 1 WTC could not interrupt train or a subway service. This meant they would have to work around the train and subway tunnels. It wasn’t easy, but after analyzing everything that was there underground in four dimensions, the team was able to figure it out.

    Yet another challenge was the sheer size of the building, and how to put together its massive beams and columns, some weighing as much as 72.5 metric tons. In order to get this done, two of the largest cranes ever used in the history of New York City had to be brought in to lift them up.

    The result of all this time, planning, and effort is one of the safest and strongest towers ever built. In the end, the estimated price tag for the building was US$3.9 billion. However, for many New Yorkers, seeing a new tower rise up where the twin towers once stood is something no one can put a price on.