For the real-estate blog network Curbed, Aaron Seward returns to his former hometown Fairfield, Iowa, where the Transcendental Meditation movement is located, to take a closer look at the town's Vastu architecture that has evolved since the 90's.

Maharishi Vastu, also called Maharishi Sthapatya Veda, is the architectural corollary of the practice of Transcendental Meditation. It evolved as part of the TM movement's effort to extend its brand to cover all aspects of life. The movement and its followers have been designing and erecting Sthapatya Vedic buildings for the past 20 years, primarily in Fairfield and its environs, but also in communities throughout the world. My trip last autumn was, in part, to slake a professional curiosity—I’m an architectural journalist. My investigation also had a personal dimension. This was far from my first trip to Fairfield. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I went through one year of junior high and two years of high school at MSAE [Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment]. My parents, practitioners of TM since the late 1960s, taught my brother and me to meditate when we were seven years old. We were one of many TM families who came from large cosmopolitan centers—Houston, Texas, in our case—to be part of this community of spiritual seekers located incongruously in the corn belt of Jefferson County, Iowa.

Traffic sign for Vedic City:

A Vastu home on Heavenly Lane:

Featured image: The Maharishi Tower of Invincibility