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We use the term “Qi” or “Chi” all the time in Feng Shui but it is a term difficult to define. I am reading “The Key Concepts in Chinese Philosophy” by Zhang Dai-Nian (1909-2004) at the moment and the translator, Edmund Ryden does a very good job in summarizing the essential meaning of Qi even though it might have changed over time in Chinese history:
Perhaps the best translation of the Chinese word qi is provided by Einstein’s equation, e=mc2. According to this equation matter and energy are convertible. In places the material element may be to the fore, in others, what we term energy. Qi embraces both. The philosophical use of the term derives from its popular use but is nonetheless distinct. In popular parlance qi is applied to the air we breathe, steam, smoke, and all gaseous substances. The philosophical use of the term underlines the movement of qi. Qi is both what really exists and what has the ability to become. To stress one at the expense of the other would be to misunderstand qi. Qi is the life principle but is also the stuff of inanimate objects. As a philosophical category, qi originally referred to the existence of whatever is of a nature to change. This meaning is then expanded to encompass all phenomena, both physical and spiritual. It is energy that has the capacity to become material object while remaining what it is. It thus combines “potentiality” with “matter”. To understand it solely as “potentiality” would be wrong, just as it cannot be translated simply as “matter”.
So Qi is both matter and energy; it is the seen and the unseen, the form and the formless, the manifested and the un-manifested, the tangible and the intangible, etc. From what we can see, we can contemplate what we cannot see, from we can cannot see, we can also contemplate its potential manifestations.
But unlike Einstein’s’ equation, there is no one fixed and measurable constant we can rely on, instead we make up correlations to investigate the relationship between the two Yin and Yang aspects of the same Qi and the answers are often, depending on the circumstance, more than just one predictable result, which Science demands and is not possible with correlative thinking.
The Chinese made the assumption that everything has Qi and everything that has Qi has Yin and Yang as well. If there is one predictable outcome then there is also many un-predictable counterparts running side by side, so if Science can give us a predictable answer, then Non-Science like Art, its complementary opposite, will always give us more than one “non-answer” answer to the same question, because to the Chinese, even a constant is constantly changing and evolving (“the only constant is change”) and Qi is often used to express this idea, hence some scholar would also equate Qi with the Dao, which is the Way and not the Destination.
Personally, I like this idea of defining “Qi” as “potentiality combines with matter”, which is another way of expressing the Yin/Yang duality, and in the book, “The Tao of Architecture”, Amos Ih Tiao Chang ended his essay with these words,
“The life quality of architecture, like the life-quality of humanity itself, exist not only in the realm of the material but also in the realm of intangibility, the realm that each man must find and conquer for himself”.
In other words, it is finding the Qi in ar-qi-tektur (or the Chi in ar-chi-tecture) and it is this process that transforms a building into architecture!
張岱年 Zhang Dai-Nian
Our display layout and scene of the exhibition last Satuday where Gyda and Tilman showcased our work in the UferHallen Berlin (I went to teach Taijiquan and Qigong in Gniezno, the first capital of Poland instead) :
EXPERIMENTDAYS09
messe für wohnkulturen + nachhaltiges bauen:
kreativ. ökologisch. wirtschaftlich. gemeinschaftlich.
03./ 04. Oktober 2009, UferHallen, Berlin
People think we are only Feng Shui teachers and consultants but in fact we are all full-time working architects experimenting with Kanuyu architecture at the coal-face using principles we teach in the buildings we make.
You can read about our approach to Feng Shui and architecture here:
http://howardchoy.wordpress.com/artarchitecture-2/
This has to be one of the best Monastic architecture we have ever seen. The austere style characteristic of the taste in Avignon at the time of
Pope Innocent VI is reminiscent of the “qing-tan” 清淡 (“pure and simple”) taste favoured by the ancient Chinese due to the Daoist influence, especially in art and poetry.
“Qing-tan” means an object is created in it most simple and direct form without any embellishment or ostentation and that is exactly how the housing for the 12 members of the first foundation of this Carthusian Monastery is organized.
The 12 cells are grouped around the Cloister of the Dead, where the monks are eventually buried without a name. There are 3 ambulatories giving access to the monk’s lodging and the form is simply expressed externally with a raised roof. Internally, the space is designed based on the daily life of a Carthusian monk, who has completely renounced all commerce with the world.
As it can be seen from the photographs, being pure and simple do
es not mean it has to be boring, on the contrary, when we try to do architecture with a capital A we tend to destroy the spirit of a building, which should reflect the “ben-xing” 本性 or the “original nature” of a building is meant for.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthusian
The Chartreuse did it in a “wu-wei” 無為 way (achieving the most with the least) and expressed succinctly the philosophy of the Carthusian order founded by Saint Bruno in 1127. The “ben-xing” of the building is clearly articulated by Saint Bruno in his “Letter to Raoul le Verd”:
“The silence and the solitude of the desert…For here men of strong will can enter themselves and remain there as much as they like… Here they can acquire the eye that wounds the B
ridegroom with love, by the limpidity of its gaze, and whose purity allows them to see God himself”.
First picture shows Saint Bruno who founded the Carthusian Order.
Second picture shows a photo of a monk doing manual work in his cell.
Third picture shows interior of a cell where a monk can work.
Fourth picture shows the ambulatory with the doorway to a monk’s cell on the left.
Fifth picture shows the fireplace where the monk can read and pray.
Sixth picture shows the Cloister of the Dead looking at the ambulatory and the raised roof of each of the monk’s cells behind.
Last Week I went flying with Ulli and Nora in a small 4-seater plane and we went from Berlin to Neuss to look at Tadao Ando’s Langen Foundation exhibition building for the day.
It is a really impressive and powerful building in his trademark off-form concrete, which one approaches from a cutout in a semi-circular wall in the middle of a former NATO base in the landscape of the Hombroich cultural prescient.
http://www.arcspace.com/architects/ando/langen/langen.html
The thing that struck me most is the different way Tadao Ando and I. M. Pei handled exhibition spaces, since earlier this year I also saw Pei’s extension to the Deutschen Historischen Museums in Berlin, where I am living now.
http://www.dhm.de/pei/
In an exhibition space there is always the question which is the guest and which is the host? Should the space serve the exhibits or the other way around?
In Ando’s Langen exhibition building, it is all about circulation, manipulating the viewers from one end of the complex to another, so there are mostly flows and little containment and that is one of the reasons why this building very powerful. As Ulli said at the end of the day, “I don’t have a “ganying” 感應 (mutual resonance) with this building, but I am awed and impressed by it”.
Whereas in Pei extension in Berlin, he separated the public circulation spaces from the exhibition spaces, so while the public circulation space is also powerful and impressive, strong enough to compliment the main building across the road, the exhibition space is very intimate and served the purpose of what it is meant to do.
There is a yin/yang interplay in Pei’s building that is missing in Ando’s masterpiece, which one gets the impression that the work of art is there to serve the building instead the other way around. One comes to look at Ando’s building and not the paintings on display. In Pei’s Berlin extension, I can see that his space is the host in the public circulation area and then his space switched to being the guest, when one enters into the exhibition halls, allowing the work on display to do their magic.
Apart from the picture of our little plane with Nora at the front and Ulli behind on the other side of the plane, I have attached the two floor plans below and if one looks at the circulation patterns of the two buildings, one will understand the importance of deciding which should be the host and which should be the guest and in what occasion, because the result will definitely affect the Feng Shui of a place, with a different atmosphere and feeling.
A simple village church or chapel has its own charm; one is not awed by the majesty of a God that is far above like in a Gothic cathedral, but feels the down-to-earth of an intimate place of worship instead. It is more human and hence touches you in a different way.
Below is a photo essay of a small church in a village called St. Sauveur Gouvernet in the Baronnies, south of France. Somehow a Romanesque arch feels differently to a Gothic one and when there are no decorations the space can make its presence felt in emptiness…
The watercolour is done by my wife Gyda.
This little square in the hillside town of Grignon just off the A7 near Momtelimar in the south of France works really well, because it is like a bay in a quiet and slow moving river giving shelter and “juqi” 聚氣 (gathering the moving qi) for the travellers.
But there is enough qi flow to charge up the place because it is right in front of the entrance gateway to the chateau of Grignan just metres away (on the map shown below it is located as number 2 and 10 is where the gateway is located) and right next door to the Hotel de Ville (Council Chamber showed as 1 in map).
The modern bench made of stone and the two trees next to it were placed just in the right place to hold the qi in the elongated and triangulated square. The water feather also added to its attraction, no wonder we had to wait for a while before we can get a table for lunch. It has good Feng Shui for the restaurant because it has a charged Mingtang to assemble the “water” for wealth.
First picture shows looking at the triangulated square from the ramp next to gateway to the walled-in chateau. Second picture shows looking at the square from the town side towards the council chamber; note the bench and trees are well placed to gather the qi for the square. Third picture shows one of the main entrance (le beffroi) to the chateau with the bell tower above. Fourth picture shows the water feature with a statue of the Marquise de Sevigne, who restored the chateau and made this place famous with her writings. Fifth picture shows the map of the Grignan Chateau.
Climbing up the West Tower of the Minster Cathedral in the middle of Freiburg im Breisgau, one can look to the east and see the Longmei (the Dragon Vein) of the Schlosssberg Mountain feeding the Diqi (the Earth Qi) into this wonderful old town founded in 1120.
Freiburg has the classic Feng Shui location of having a mountain at the back (located at the foothill of the Black Forest mountains) and facing the Rhein River to the front with a generous Mingtang in between.
In an old and well-preserved town like this, the church tower is still the urban marker, visible from all directions, and functioning like an Accupoint of the land to mark the Xue (the Feng Shui Spot) for the town.
The square outside the Minster is the heart of the old town and the open space on both sides (a double Mingtang) draws the visitors and the locals like a magnet with its potent mix of commerce and religion, there is a market everyday except Sunday and church services everyday.
The Minster is dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary, so it is consecrated to the “Yin Qi of Creation’, according to the Chinese, and when one looks at the West Portal with its Yang Tower soaring into the sky (116M high) and the Yin Gothic entry porch like a Yoni, one cannot but feel the creative power of Yin and Yang coming together to give life to this vibrant old town.
To me, the act of creation is further accentuated symbolically by the 3 vertical columns located in front of the West Portal, 3 being the Yang number that give rise to 10,000 things (from the ground up).
But death is always present in the midst of life and one can see in some of the sculptures inside the church, so do enjoy every living moment we have and this was how I felt as we drove towards the French border this morning on our way to Provence….
“Each house that is built is, in a certain sense, a reenactment of the creation of the world.” Mircea Eliade.
Topping-Off rituals has been practiced all over the world and we saw some of it in China in our last trip, but the Europeans like the Romanian, the French and the German do them as well.
The Chinese version is to burn some incense, make a lot of noise like doing drums, letting off fire crackers and lion dance and then paste lucky charms or talismans on the beams and rafters like the picture showed below taken in Dali by Michael Rapp.
In Romania, when the top of the rafters is installed, it is adorned with a fir tree or a green branch decorated with paper flowers or ribbons. In France, the ridge beam bouquet is still sometimes carried out, hung by the youngest member of the crew, and in Germany, where I am living now; the Richtfest is still practiced, and often accompanied by a Spruch (a poem read aloud by the head craftsperson). The picture showed below is the result of a Richtfest I downloaded from one of the Internet sites.
Are rituals like these considered superstitious? It is not a religious practice, it is like a celebration of things well done without any mishaps. More importantly, it affirms the house is the center of the world for the occupants. It is a pity more and more building rituals are dying out both in China and the West. May be we just take things for granted?
Being architects, my wife Gyda Anders and I, have a different approach to Feng Shui, and the other day I picked up a book written by a PhD candidate in the History Department of Beijing University, where he wrote about a new approach to the study of Feng Shui in Mainland China. I think what he described fits ours very closely as well, so I have roughly translated his words as a reference to our own thinking.
The author name is Wang Hao 王浩 and the book is called “Shen Suan – Zhongguo Shushude Mimi” (神算 – 中國術數的秘密), which I have translated as “Divine Calculations – The Secrets of the Chinese Art of Numbers”.
“In recent years, a group of specialists and scholars from the architectural field has declared openly that their in-depth study and research have revealed that the core content of Feng Shui is in fact essentially the same as the principles used in ancient Chinese architecture and planning. They reckon by using Feng Shui one can resolve the thousand years old riddle relating to how the architectural space is managed in our environment and how the man-made and the natural landscape are integrated in large or small-scale projects in ancient time. From this point of view, Feng Shui can be seen as a multi-disciplined and unified architectural theory that incorporated the study of geography, ecology and philosophy etc. as well as landscape and architectural design. Although this approach cannot fully explain all the mysteries attributed to Feng Shui, nevertheless it is a surprising but valid approach worth pursuing.”
“Lijing Old Town and Naxi Local Style Dwelling Houses”, 離江古城輿納西民居 Edited by Zhu Liang-Wen 朱良文
Lijiang Naxi local dwellings have four basic layouts, these are:
1) 三坊一照璧 “San Fang Yi Zhao Bi” or a house “three buildings and one screen wall”, which has one main building with two side wings plus a screen wall opposite the main block, together they formed a u-shape San He Yuan, or a three sided enclosed courtyard with the fourth side being a screen wall (1/Diag 1)
2) 四合五天井 “Si He Wu Tian Jiang” or a “four sided courtyard house with five sky-wells” , which has a main building at the back with two side wings and another block opposite the main building forming a four-sided courtyard house. Apart from the large central sky-well (the courtyard) there are four smaller corner sky-wells for ventilation called “Lou Jiao” 漏角 or “leaking corner” (2/Diag 1)
3) 前後院 “Qian Hou Yuan” or a house with a “front and back courtyard”, which uses the central axis measured off the main building at the back of the house to layout out two courtyards. The main courtyard is in the form of “four sides with five sky-wells” and the front garden is in the form of “three buildings with one screen wall”. The room that separated the main and secondary courtyards is called a “Hua Ting” 花廳 or a “flower lounge” (3/Diag 1).
4) 一進兩院 “Yi Jin Liang Yuan” or a “one entry with two courtyards” house which is very similar to the “front and back courtyards” house mentioned previously, with the exception that the main building is now in the central block that separates the two courtyards. (4/Diag 1). Diagram 1 is shown below:
The Yu Family Garden 余家花園 dwelling we visited in our last China Feng Shui study tour in Lijiang is a classic “front and back courtyards” layout, with the larger courtyard forming the heart of the arrangement.
One approaches the house and the main courtyard not through the street, but through a side gate and a passageway along one side of the house. At the end of the passageway is a blank wall and one has to turn 180 degrees to see the main door, which leads to the main courtyard of the house. When the door opens, one again faces another screen wall and the main courtyard is not visible until one turns left to see the garden fully with the main building across the courtyard.
The Yu Residence was built in 1925 with the main building facing east and all the wings are in two storeys. (Diagrams below showed Ground Floor and Upper Floor Plans and an Isometric view of the house):
At a first glance, the directionality of this house is not clear and that is because the front courtyard in the form of a “three buildings with a screen wall” layout faces the tall boundary wall of the Mufu 木府 (Mu’s Mansion) next door not able to see the open space beyond and the screen wall has not lost its function. This is because when the building was first built the Mufu was in a state of dilapidation and the present boundary wall was missing, giving the required Ming Tang at the front, which was the garden of the Mu’s Mansion.
All in all, there are four special features common to Lijiang Naxi local dwellings, these are:
1) Use a large sky-well in the form of a courtyard as the centre/heart to organize the various components of a house, no matter what type of layout is used. This light-well has either 3 or 4 sides covered with rooms laid out along a central axis that faces either the east or the south. A screen wall or a lower building opposite the main sitting is often used to reinforce this axial layout.
2) The main building or sitting is often two storeys high with the sides and opposite wing in either one or two storeys.
3) Each house has a generous amount of covered balcony or outdoor terrace and walkway for protected family activities like eating, meeting guests, rest and exercise.
4) The corners of the house are often left open to facilitate light and ventilation. Sometimes the corners are used for entry, kitchen or storage so these spaces are not wasted.
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