Abstract
Feng shui is a traditional Chinese art of creating a supportive living environment. Despite many research contributions on feng shui, very few verify (comparatively or experimentally) the actual effectiveness of feng shui recommendations. Even the architectural profession has never clearly denied its opinion on feng shui. This comparative analysis seeks to determine whether 118 selected feng shui school of form recommendations are consistent with the recommendations of Alexander et al.’s pattern language and with selected findings in environmental psychology. The results support this, showing that 34% of the recommendations (or forty recommendations out of 118 in total) are consistent with pattern language and that 45% (or fifty-three recommendations) are fully or partially consistent with the findings of environmental psychology. Altogether, more than half of the recommendations (57%, or sixty-seven recommendations) are consistent (indirectly confirmed) by one or the other knowledge system, which means that it is very likely that these recommendations will actually have the promised impact on users of physical space. Twenty-seven feng shui recommendations (or 23% out of the 118) are doubly consistent, of which most are related to the five-animals feng shui model, the importance of the presence of water and natural light in the living environment, and the importance of the main entrance. The bulk of the recommendations, which remain unaddressed, relate to the Chinese concept of living energy, or qi.
Highlights
Feng shui is a traditional Chinese art of environmental design that is supposed to support the user as much as possible
Further logical reasoning was that the magnetic eld a ects humans. e magnet’s needle, following the principle of “equal attracts equal”, is supposed to be capable of showing the ow of Earth’s qi because it was magnetized directly with Earth’s qi. e feng shui compass school developed di erent techniques for calculating what the quality of qi should be in speci c areas of physical space relative to the compass directions based on the magnetism of the Earth and at speci c time intervals based on the in uence of celestial bodies
Based on the results of the comparative analyses, the answer to the research question is a rmative in both cases. e combined comparison of the compliant recommendations according to one or the other of the two analyses further shows that Alexander et al.’s patterns and the ndings of environmental psychology do not cover the same feng shui recommendations
Summary
Feng shui is a traditional Chinese art of environmental design that is supposed to support the user as much as possible It is rooted in traditional Chinese philosophy and tightly embedded in the Chinese cultural and historical framework. At the turn of the millennium, it experienced its rst major peak of Western popularity, but the architectural profession never clearly de ned its opinion on the phenomenon of feng shui. One reason for this is certainly the feng shui research barriers that Western researchers are exposed to: the diversity of feng shui schools, methods, and techniques, a lack of knowledge of the language and cultural background, the subjectivity of interpreting recommendations, and, above all, the problem of isolating feng shui e ects and, their scienti c validation. Popular religion extends beyond the concrete material world into the world of spirits, ancestors, and local gods, where feng shui is largely de ned through the cult of ancestor worship and the cult of worshipping nature as a living being
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