Four Houses Four Stories - Flipbook - Page 67
Evening glow in
the family room as
seen from bridge.
We read about the
Feng Shui nightmare at architect
Norman Foster’s
Hong Kong Bank project. The 500-year-old
bank had never suffered a loss and had a
long history of prosperity. Shortly after the bank
opened, it suffered great
distress. Another Feng Shui
master was called and one
of the problems was the location of the front entry doors
and so on. So when our clients,
who are third generation ChineseAmerican, said they wanted to apply
the mystical principles of Feng-Shui
to their new home, we were intrigued
but also a bit apprehensive. We received
an interesting simple assessment from
the Master—locate the children’s bedrooms
on the west side of the site, master bedroom
on the east side and “it must be a regular
shape” but also face west; no long corridor
in alignment with the staircase. Challenging
enough but we were able to make sense of the
Master’s guidelines and apply them into the
design from the beginning without any problems. When the design was nearly completed,
the Master reviewed the layout one final time.
It was then that some additional guidelines surfaced—add a water feature near entry doors
because “water calms the spirit” and [does
this and that, etc., etc.], don’t plant any bamboo
because “bamboo pokes tiger’s eyes,” soften
some of the acuteness of the angles because
“too pointed is like a knife and will bring bad
luck.” The experience was both intriguing and
disconcerting because the client and the designer did not know if the Master was “playing
architect.” We still do not know if the Feng Shui
principles and if the Master’s suggested application of the principles were absolutes. But, we
all complied and feel the aesthetic and function
of the design were not compromised in the
quest for spiritual harmony.
DESIGN
SOLUTION
