Feng Shui: A Chinese Bioarchitecture for the West

 

BIOARCHITECTURE FENG SHUI

BY ARCH. STEFANO PARANCOLA

Feng shui, the ancient Chinese art of Wind and Water, has as its primary objective the search for the well-being of man in confined and non-confined environments, studying the interrelationships between the Sky-Man-Earth triad.
The principles of feng shui were also present in Western architectural and landscape culture, especially in the Arab one (called geomancy) and later flowed into the construction of Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals.
In all cultures, respect for the genius loci (intended as the vital environment of a given site), the relationship between the building and its surroundings and respect for natural elements (watercourses, hills, vegetation, etc.) were fundamental.

There are general rules in Feng shui, but it is important to underline the peculiarity and specificity of each intervention, of each place and building in which one intervenes or designs from scratch. Every environmental situation has its own character to respect and this is in fact one of the fundamental aspects of Feng Shui, that is, the art of harmonizing spaces in tune with the surrounding environment and the people who live there.

Feng Shui is not an esoteric phenomenon that has only recently come to the fore, but is also an underground current that has been studied and that has come to light in the writings of some famous architects (Norman Foster, Ieoh Ming Pei and Gino Valle) and further back in time also in the design determinants of some of their works (Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking Corporation, Bank of China and Monument to the Resistance in Udine).

The renewed interest in Feng Shui in Italy (after the era of the solitary pioneers) has its roots not in exotic mannerism (even if certain declinations contained in volumes very pushed towards the new age, would lead us to agree with this explanation), but in an affirmation of the currents of holistic thought and in a continuous revision of our Cartesian coordinates.
It is important to combine the new disciplines: Feng Shui, bioecological or sustainable architecture and organic architecture. The three practices can be respectively associated with three faces of a new culture: the sacred respect for the landscape, the concern for the health of living and the consideration of the link between the living and the built expressed in organic forms (this consideration has very distant roots in the field of architecture and includes illustrious fathers, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, in the Modern Movement).

It is important to underline in Feng Shui the analysis of the territorial dimension and the importance of the water element. It should be remembered that the application of the art of Wind and Water in the planning of cities and monuments has a longer history, in terms of centuries, than Feng Shui for houses and tombs and that its birth is closely related to that of hydraulic engineering.

In the term Feng Shui the ideograms Wind and Water have a very profound meaning, as both individually and in combination they formally represent the manifestation of the flow of energy. Two of the cornerstones on which the practice of feng shui is based are: Qi (vital breath or cosmic breath) and Sha Qi (secret arrow). The first corresponds to the energy that flows through nature that must be collected and accumulated, avoiding stagnation, the second instead designates a threat represented by rectilinear shapes that generally point towards the building.

Mother Earth
Although feng shui is based on the Taoist vision and experience of nature, the idea that the Earth is full of energy, therefore understood as a living organism, does not belong only to Taoism. Our ancestors were aware of the fact that the nature that surrounds us was a living organism. Symbolically this was represented by means of spirals, snakes, dragons. All these representations had as a common denominator the fact that the creative force that was at their base was described in the form of a meandering or tortuous movement.

Even the term feng shui is not accidental. For Stephen Skinner (1985), “wind and water together express the power of the elements that flow in the natural environment. This power is expressed and derives from the flow of energy that flows not only on the surface, which has been sculpted by wind and water, but also within the Earth”.

 

This highlights how the Chinese considered feng shui not so much as a superstitious branch of rural practices, but as part of the study of the Earth and its models, both natural and artificial. Feng shui emphasizes the forms and signs of the landscape by analyzing them from the point where they arise to the point where they end and thus determining their position and orientation. One of the two fundamental Feng shui Schools is that of Form or Configuration which analyzes natural features (mountains, hills, large trees, rocks, valleys, major and minor waterways…) and artificial ones (buildings, telephone lines, high voltage, and infrastructures in general).

Cosmology and landscape have always been the two roots on which feng shui is based, therefore the sacred respect for the genius loci, understood as the morphogenetic matrix that operated in the past to which the urban and environmental quality present in a territory is due, is one of the cornerstones of this discipline.

In this sense, it is worth remembering the interpretation given by the architect Paolo Portoghesi (1999): “The original Chinese sensibility tends to see life as something that pervades the entire universe, and manifests itself not only in what we call living beings but also in the winds, in springs and lakes, in trees, in rocks, in the Earth. With a spirit similar to that of some Indian-American tribes who refused to cultivate the land so as not to “hurt their mother”, the Chinese have a sacred respect for the landscape and maintain that to introduce something new, one must avoid “sticking a thorn in its flesh” and instead design a form that flows and flows together with the rhythm of the Earth”.

Feng Shui in Architecture
In the book by Pierre Alain Croset (1989) the experience that the architect Gino Valle had at Harvard in 1951 is cited. It reads: “Among the various interpretative keys of Gino Valle’s work there is that of “regionalism” based on the relationships between Valle’s work and the local culture….. Valle experiences this relationship with the environment perhaps first of all in its anthropological dimension, as he seems to suggest in his continuous reference to a significant text by Patrick Abercrombie – “fetish and traveling companion”, dedicated to the practice and experience of feng shui: ‘The Chinese have always considered the countryside as their home. For this reason they have always attempted to harmonize human interventions with natural characteristics so as to make a new and composite landscape, a fusion of complex art with nature. This has been described as the science of adapting the residence of the living and the dead so that they harmonize and cooperate with the local currents of cosmic breath'”.

Many architects have embraced the consideration of the link between the living and the built expressed in organic forms, an eloquent example is given by Frank Lloid Wright, exponent of the Modern Movement.

The use of organic forms in architecture obviously lies in the punctual and undetermined creativity of each architectural “theme”, as well as in its non-conformism with respect to the forms acquired over the centuries by Western tradition. All the spatial schemes accredited for centuries fundamentally geometric and perspective are abandoned. Thus in oriental architecture and in particular in Chinese architecture, one does not access a building by a large perspective avenue, but by walking on a series of flints arranged in a sinuous and meandering manner on the lawn.
The same rule is applied in gardens where the crossing elements take on zigzag shapes and configurations.

Green as an element of redevelopment and control of the microclimate
The geomancer must have a deep understanding of disciplines such as astronomy, geography, topography, geobiology, numerology and the architecture of water and landscape.
He takes into account, first of all, the fact that, like the water of a river, symbol of life and prosperity, must flow slowly and fluidly to nourish a territory, so also the Qi energy must enter, circulate and exit the environments to make them vital.

The rejection of linearity is the basis of the practice of Wind and Water in a certain sense the curved lines are typical of Chinese civilization, just as the lines and right angles are characteristic of Western civilization. The same logic is repeated in the design of the garden that differs from the Western scheme, where the character of grandiose geometric and perspective rectification of nature is emphasized, so the Chinese garden escapes any compositional rule, it is all a succession of “green and water facts”, located in the right balance of the five elements and the theory of yin and yang (succession of slow and fast waters, soft and bright colors, light and shadow …).

A place is therefore never isolated, but is an integral part of a more global configuration based on many elements belonging to the natural and artificial world such as: hills, mountains, waterways, buildings and infrastructures.
To recover the meaning of environment, we must therefore conceive it as a network of places potentially capable of supporting a complex of physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual interactions.