Feng Shui explained

What is Feng Shui?

You know the standard answer: it means wind and water, comes from China, is 3,000 years old and has something to do with harmonious living. All true. But Feng Shui is much more: acupuncture for rooms. Energy architecture. A planning tool for gardens, houses, flats and businesses, learnt from the processes of nature. Behind it lie Taoist philosophy, ethnomathematics and very logical systems of analysis and calculation.

What is meant by good Feng Shui?

With a few exceptions, there is no good or bad Feng Shui. There are rooms that suit their function, and rooms that suit a person. Or do not. Most people feel it straight away: “I feel at home here.” Or: “Get me out of here.” It has little to do with expensive furniture or an exotic garden, and much more with the spirit of a place, the quality of a room or landscape. The builders of old cathedrals called it “Genius Loci”.

An example?

Hamburg’s harbour feels different from Blankenese, and Blankenese has a different Qi from Altona with its multicultural mix and quite different architecture. A pond full of reeds has a different Qi from a Zen garden, a roundabout from a junction with traffic lights. Different things happen there; the patterns are different. We know it in everyday life too: after an argument, “you could cut the atmosphere with a knife”.

• Bagua: the octagon of eight trigrams with which the Bagua School organises a home’s life areas.
• Flying Stars: a method for calculating a house’s quality of time by period and year.
• Form School: looks at the surroundings, mountains, water, roads and buildings, and how Qi flows.
• Five elements (Wu Xing): Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water, five phases of change that nourish and control one another.
• I Ching: the Book of Changes, whose 64 hexagrams form the basis of Imperial Feng Shui.
• Compass School: uses a compass to determine building orientation and directions within a room.
• Kua number: a personal number calculated from the year of birth.
• Lo Pan: the Chinese compass, my “wooden laptop”.
• Ming Tang: the open space in front of an entrance where Qi can gather.
• Qi: the life energy that flows through rooms and landscapes.
• Sha Qi: unfavourable Qi flowing too quickly, the “poison arrows” of sharp edges and straight paths, for example.
• Yin and Yang: the complementary poles of shade and light, stillness and movement.

Feng Shui begins not at the sofa but outside the front door. Water is crucial: where it comes from and where it flows. Among other things, I have studied the course of the Elbe. Where water approaches a town or district from the south-east, a great deal of life energy is likely to gather, and prosperity develops. Beside Sarajevo City Hall, the Miljacka flows from east to west, ideal in terms of the Form School.

We do not need incense sticks, pictures of dragons or waterfall posters. We work with practical planning methods, for example to fit a building well into its surroundings. The principles apply to driveways and paths, gardens and light, room layouts and, only at the end, decoration. A good Feng Shui consultant calculates the acupuncture point in a space precisely, so that Qi can flow freely.

So it has little to do with rearranging furniture in a Chinese fashion, and wall colour is secondary too. A good consultation first looks outdoors: traffic, paths, neighbouring buildings, gardens, water. Then come rooms, offices and sales areas. In modern terms, we create a psychological profile of a space: function, compass direction, light, windows, doors and routes through the room are considered together.

Then we look at movement and stillness:

• How do you move through the space, indoors and out?
• What blocks the routes through it?
• What guides guests and visitors into which rooms?
• How much protection and shelter do the bed, desk, sofa and armchair have?
• Do the person, room and function fit together?

Only once movement and stillness are balanced do we turn to decoration: colour, materials, shapes, light, pictures, furniture and plants.

Daniel Libeskind, who won the competition for Ground Zero in New York, encountered Feng Shui while working on a building in Hong Kong. In his book “Breaking Ground”, he writes:

“Feng Shui may strike some as a pseudoscience, and I must admit that, in my view, the basic idea of the City University building [Hong Kong] did not change significantly simply because the building was not red, as I had planned. Yet according to Feng Shui, too much red leads to disputes. […] But I made other adjustments too: I changed some of the building’s angles to ensure they were in harmony with the ancient spirits. Working with the Feng Shui Master, I learnt a great deal, and I realised that many of these beliefs are based on experience. Feng Shui concerns how a building is positioned in relation to water and certain compass directions; in short, how it is positioned in the world. And this knowledge is something all architects should understand and respect.

Vitruvius was trying to convey exactly the same thing 2,000 years ago. […] But between the lines, Vitruvius deals with deeper, mystical questions: he spoke of premonitions and of the importance of considering both omens and natural phenomena, such as flocks of birds or the play of wind and light. […] Everything, after all, is connected.”

Source: Breaking Ground, Entwürfe meines Lebens (German edition). Daniel Libeskind. Translated from the German.

Two examples from my tour blog: the Chinese House in Sanssouci Park, an 18th-century chinoiserie that leaves you wondering where the front actually is. And the splendour of the Alhambra in Granada, a well-known geomantic place of power.

I went to Hong Kong to see how Norman Foster and I. M. Pei built with Feng Shui: Feng Shui and architecture in Hong Kong.

• What is Feng Shui?
• Feng Shui and science
• Geomancy, its European counterpart
• All guides