Architects and interior designers bang into feng shui.
An ideal feng shui home might be facing south, with a mountain behind and water, perhaps a lake or the sea, in front. A moderate amount of traffic would flow unhindered around the building, and visitors would traverse a meandering front path through a garden to get to a centrally placed front door.
Inside the house, which would be square, visitors would immediately be confronted with a screen to stop chi flowing in too quickly. An aquarium to the north would help the owner’s career, while the east would be adorned with plants and wooden items to protect the health of the occupants.
In modern Taipei, however, accommodating all this is difficult. Buildings cramped together offer little light or opportunity to control the entry or exit of chi, the flow of energy that all living things require. Inside, feng shui-ignorant designers allow ideas to escape out of windows and money down the toilet. Outside, traffic snarls on roads and strong winds of damaging chi harass those occupying increasingly tall buildings.
As Taipei’s architects adopt modern designs and people spend more on decorating their houses, they come up against the ancient tradition of feng shui, and old often wins out over new.
Some feng shui is relatively straightforward, common sense even. Rooms that are too dark will make you depressed, too bright and you will become irritable. No one likes their desk at work to be near a door, but you do not need a feng shui master to tell you this because the constant flow of people is distracting. In fact, if you feel comfortable at home or in your workplace, this in many respects is good feng shui.
However, feng shui gets a lot more complicated, and its practitioners spend many years studying the relationships between the five basic elements (fire, water, wood, earth and metal), the balance between yin and yang and how buildings and rooms are aligned with compass points. Even then, they must take into account the local topography to uncover dragon lines, how chi flows and its influence on the fortunes of the individuals who will occupy the building.
Tian Yi Shang Ren, who has studied feng shui for more than 20 years and now runs a fortune-telling Web site, says he employs a “very scientific” form of feng shui , according to which he aligns people’s brainwaves to their surrounding environment, particularly nature’s magnetic field. He compares his theory to a radio.
“When you raise the antenna and point the radio in a certain direction, you can hear it very clearly,” he says. “But if you face it the wrong way, it won’t work well. People’s brains are just the same.”
So if your home and workplace are oriented in a way that aligns your brainwaves to the earth’s magnetic field, you will be in a good mood and everything will go well.
“If the direction is wrong, everything will become unclear and you won’t have the energy to make money,” he says.
With this kind of concern in mind, many people get a feng shui master to go over their building plans or office layout. Wang Chung-ping, vice chairman of C.Y. Lee and Partners, which designed Taipei 101, is often asked to accommodate feng shui concerns, but sees little science in it. “To me, it’s very much a psychological thing,” he says. “We don’t encourage building owners to hire feng shui masters, but most seem to.”
In many cases, it is the richer building owners who pay more attention to feng shui, and as a result, architects have picked up some feng shui knowledge to avoid problems later in the design process. “We have some very basic knowledge of feng shui: back to a hill; face to an open area; no street running in your face. It’s common knowledge in our culture. Usually what we do is OK,” Wang says.
Even so, architects trained in western design methods frequently ignore the finer points of feng shui. In design, for example, straight lines are seen as attractive, capable of producing an eye-catching sense of symmetry. Feng shui, however, views straight lines with suspicion, as they transmit chi too quickly. China’s first railway, constructed by Europeans, so disturbed those living near it that it was ripped up and thrown into the sea.
Wang ran into the problem of straight lines while designing Taipei 101. An alley ran straight into the side of the building, so he was advised to place a fountain containing a marble ball at that entrance to slow the chi entering the building.
For some feng shui masters, Taipei 101 has many other problems. Zhang Hsu-chu, one of the feng shui masters who worked on the project, acknowledges the site is not that good. He says the building’s foundations destroyed one of the dragon lines flowing through Taipei, and the site used to be a place of execution, meaning there are a lot of ghosts in the area. These ghosts, he says, were responsible for the deaths of three men working on the building during an earthquake in 2003. He told the owner that praying to the ghosts would placate them, and there were no further problems. “The chi for this area has been drained,” he says, “but it’ll return.”
Feng shui is not averse to all things symmetrical; however, odd shapes and irregular angles can cause problems. Ying Fei-chun, an associate partner at Artech Inc., says he does not know much about feng shui and is often asked to change his designs because the client does not like sharp angles that give off arrows of damaging chi. “We had a project where the design was a triangle, but the client was concerned about the shape because of feng shui, so in the end we changed it to a square,” he says.
While feng shui can be frustrating for architects, Ying says he feels sorriest for interior designers, who have to pay a lot of attention to the “eight areas,” which are aligned according to the cardinal and intercardinal points on a compass. Each of the “eight areas” relates to an aspect of your life, such as career, health, family and love. Each has colors that complement it, and should be prominent in that area. The cardinal compass points are also associated with one of the five elements, so water and black can help your career and should be together. In the opposite area, fire and red can help you become famous. Get these colors and elements mixed up, and disaster can befall your work or family life, something building owners are keen to avoid.
“We have huge problems,” says Julie Chen, an interior designer at Taipei-based Daza Group. “Sometimes you have to change your whole layout. They will say you have to place the CEO on the east side but you have placed the public area or a conference room there.”
Beams are bad in every school of feng shui, but in modern buildings they are normally hidden by ceiling panels. Not good enough for some clients, Chen says.
“Some clients really care about not sitting under beams,” she says. “So they will ask for the blueprints of where all the beams are, even though they can’t see them.”
Usually, it is the feng shui master who gets his or her way, but not always. Chen says she recently dealt with a client whose feng shui master objected to having windows on three sides of the conference room. The designer insisted that the windows offered more natural light and good views from the 12th floor. “We had a little fight with the feng shui guy,” Chen says. “The client decided to keep the windows there, and change it later if he thought the feng shui was bad.”
Feng shui, steeped in tradition as it is, is nevertheless open to interpretation. The “Three Combinations” school, for example, focuses on landforms and seeks “dragon lines” to define where the best places to construct buildings are. The “Eight Mansions” school, on the other hand, looks at an individual’s birthday to assess whether the person is ruled by the east or west guardian star, and therefore how their home should be arranged. Other schools, such as the “Flying Stars” school, examine how energy flows around a building.
There are also many tools of the feng shui trade. The most common one is the luopan, a complicated device based around a compass that can be used in conjunction with a person’s birthday to work out where the person’s strong and weak areas are in the building. Then, of course, there is the I-Ching, or the Book of Changes, which for thousands of years has provided fortune-tellers with a guide to nature and human endeavors based on Taoist theology and the interaction of yin and yang. Once feng shui problems have been identified, they can be fixed with plants, fountains, crystals or even mirrors, which can reflect the damaging chi arrows coming from the corner of a building across the street.
The wide variety of feng shui theory means that architects can avoid some problems by finding a practitioner who is more sympathetic to modern design. “The feng shui guys we normally work with better understand our design concepts, so they don’t ask for big changes,” Chen says. “But if clients find their own feng shui guy, basically we have to change whatever they want us to.”
Another solution that is gaining popularity is to combine the theory of feng shui with modern design concepts.
Wang Ching-wen has been studying the relationship for more than 20 years at the National Taipei University of Technology, trying to rationalize why certain feng shui theories produce good design, rather than placing blind faith in them.
He says architects already employ basic feng shui theory in their designs, such as ventilation and the flow of air around a building, as well as how the movement of the sun affects the lighting conditions inside. The increasing popularity of “green buildings,” he says, demonstrates a further step in this direction. “Designers will deny this has anything to do with feng shui and say it is based on practical consideration, but in fact it is very good feng shui,” he says.
Growing interest in feng shui has led one of his students to set up a class for architects, where 40 students study the ancient theories in three-month courses to help them get their designs more quickly accepted by superstitious building owners.
That architects are willing to invest their time and money studying an ancient art that is so difficult to explain scientifically demonstrates the importance people place on feng shui and the confidence feng shui practitioners such as Zhang have in their own skills. “Whether you believe in it or not, feng shui can protect you from bad things,” Zhang says. “So if you know something bad’s coming, you have a chance to avoid the worst of it.”
Graham Norris is a freelance
journalist based in Taipei.
Copyright (c) 2005 by Graham Norris.