By Allen Kong, Wintringham’s architect

In the traditional Chinese system there are five arms of medicine, and feng-shui and tai-chi are two of them. Massage, food and acupuncture are the other three. It’s all part of the same thing, only they emphasize different things and have slightly different applications.

Feng-shui is the art of placing buildings auspiciously in the landscape in order to harmonize the relationship between people and the environment. You use elements and building fabrics to balance the negative and positive factors (yin and yang). It harmonizes people with the environment and uses the building as the modifier. The building is the modifier of the environment and either protects or enhances the living environment for the residents. Tai-chi is like feng-shui for the body and feng-shui is like tai-chi for the environment.

I started my business around 1989. I had been doing work for this fellow whose name is also Brian who works for the government housing department. He was involved in the Gordon House project that Bryan Lipmann was working on. I had just left the company I was working for and was starting to do projects on my own. I went and saw this guy to see what sort of aged-care projects were coming up. He said there was this project down at Gordon House that involves relocating 90 people into hostels. He told me, “I reckon this is the sort of project you should ring him up about.”

He described it to me, and I thought of the big welfare organizations I’d been involved with and I thought, “Oh, that sounds a little bit too high-powered for me,” and I never followed it up. I’d been doing another project and I submitted it to Brian for approval, and while I was at his desk Bryan Lipmann rang him up and told him the architect who’d been advising Gordon House relocation couldn’t come look at one of the buildings Bryan Lipmann wanted to look at, so Brian suggested Bryan Lipmann call me. That’s how we actually came to meet.

I went to do a house inspection, then another one, did a design, did some more stuff, then kept on doing it. That’s a potted history – Brian might give you another story! It seems like one of those fortuitous things that worked out remarkably well.

I’ve got Chinese background, and I also studied tai-chi with a Chinese grandfather. It was a number of things happening all at once, as it often does. I started learning tai-chi because I thought it was an interesting form of exercise – I used to travel quite a lot and it’s not so easy to play the traditional sports like golf and tennis when you’re traveling. I thought tai-chi would fill that space well.

I started to study and understand it more and felt the effects of chi flow personally, and wanted to study more and more. It was when we started the first Wintringham project, McLean lodge that I started to look more deeply into feng-shui. Our architectural designs were affected by the philosophy. I incorporated feng-shui, but in a very elementary way – it was after reading some materials and not formally studying it. For our second project I was looking around for a practitioner of feng-shui, and around the same time a flyer came through advertising a course.

I went and did that course with an American named Bill Spears. There are various schools, like different lineages, in feng-shui, and he calls his “intuitive” feng-shui, which mainly draws on the teachings from the three-door pa-gua school. He touched a lot on other things but he concentrated on that the most, as it’s the easiest to get a grasp on. He taught about how to read the environment around you – the shapes, how they affect you, what factors come into play. He taught a lot of other things, but it was quite a while ago so I don’t recall all of them. It gave me a little more understanding.

Since then I’ve done a longer course of 1-1/2 years, which pretty much went through all the schools and all the applications of the different schools. The teacher told us to decide on whatever school best suits the project we were undertaking and apply that from an intuitive base. Because we’re not dealing with particular individuals (in whose case we would get their horoscopes and build directly for them), it’s more a general overview of the site.

We tend not to advertise the fact that we use feng-shui principles in our building. However, we will mention it; for example, when we were building the Port Melbourne hostel I put in one paragraph saying we’d incorporate its philosophy into the planning, materials and choosing the way the houses would go, but without any particular detail. If someone was interested they might ask. It’s really so that people will know there are other things involved.

Bryan kind of feels like, well, if that’s the way you want to do the buildings then its okay by me. Because I’ve internalized feng-shui so much it’s hard for me to pick out which parts are feng-shui and which are Western architecture. I’m most interested in the way the two overlap, which is more in the physical, superficial parts of feng-shui.

For instance, if there is a site, you go and check out what’s good and bad about it, but in slightly different ways. In one of the courses we were doing there were a couple of architects with us and they kept saying, “We do this all the time.” You go out and see where the auspicious points are, using various feng-shui terms, only in Western architecture you identify the power spots and where the light is coming from – there’re different sorts of names for them. When we start talking about looking for the tortoise, dragon and tiger elements, then Western architecture drops away a bit. I still think there’s some stream of teaching in architecture that’s not the formally-educated university sort of architectural theories that seem to dominate everyone’s ways of thinking, and which has sort of pushed to the background some of the understanding that architects might have had through the history of architecture in the West.

Architects used to be master builders and not just designers. Through the 20th century they’ve developed architecture as a specific profession and the philosophy has become more intellectual, which is probably the most influential part of modern and Western architecture. Westerners decided to invent their own rules, partly based on what they understood from the past but also due to a whole new political background. Architecture is looked at from a completely intellectual point of view so the schools tend to be dominated by those sorts of things. I think there’s still a great degree of understanding that underlies the profession. A lot of it has been pushed away, though, because everyone is striving for a new set of esthetics or planning guidelines. It’s fragmented away from – if we believe in feng-shui – the relationship of buildings, materials and environment, including the world and people. I never discuss this – I kind of keep it to myself.

There are two aspects to feng-shui. One of them is immediate: it gives a nice feeling and people feel particularly comfortable. It’s not esthetic; it’s a feeling about the whole project. It’s a feel about the place, and it’s a first, immediate thing. People come along to this place and say, “This really feels nice,” and the next thing they do is try to figure out why it feels so nice. They look around and say, “It must feel nice because of …” and think it’s the bricks or the wood or some other materials. It’s quite interesting because a lot of people do that!

That’s one good benefit of it.

Secondly, without going through the case histories of all the people at the Wintringham hostels, we try as much as possible to emphasize the nurturing aspect of feng-shui. These people are not the most centered people due to the types of lives they’ve led – rough and roaming lifestyles. Their lives have been all over the place, for lack of a better word. We try to make the houses more centered and supportive.

Aged-care services have been touching more on making things familiar in order to make them supportive. In feng-shui making things familiar is generally an earth element thing, as the earth element basically supports virtually every other element. We apply a lot of water elements as well; the earth is supportive and nurturing and the water element increases harmonious flow. We try to use those elements to provide extra support for the residents. Whether these things work is hard to tell! I’m interested to research it through observational feedback from the staff.

Another big impact on the sites is landscape. We’ve been doing that for quite a while. Everyone knows how beneficial it is to have living plants that represent new growth around us – we love them! On an energetic level they increase the wood element. Even in landscaping there’s a difference between the esoteric aspect and the Western way. The Western style is more intellectual in nature, whereas we’re just laid back and plant them in abundance – it’s the energetic knowledge combined with knowing that everyone just feels better with them. They’re sort of a double meaning thing as well in terms of a Western and feng-shui element scheme. That’s what I’m finding interesting – those crossovers between the West and feng-shui. They come at things from different ways but the elements they use are often similar.

A Western architect wouldn’t consider how well the elements are balanced – it’s more mechanical for them. I think in the Western teachings they have no understanding of that at all. I went up to one tutorial in Melbourne where the student was doing a Chinese project. Her lecturer had said, “I’ve been to Hong Kong once, I know about feng-shui. You can do anything you like – if you slice it up it looks just like deconstructionist architecture.” There are so many things happening in that short paragraph that I didn’t even want to tackle it! Deconstructionist architecture is about as far away from feng-shui as you can get. If you really wanted to damage the philosophy that’s what you’d say. As far as balancing elements, no, Western architecture doesn’t go into it at all.

I plan to continue incorporating feng-shui into my projects – I can’t really get away from it! It’s just a part of the way I do things now and they’ve been totally absorbed into my designs the same way solar efficiency or environmental issues are incorporated.

I like doing individual houses because you can plan specifically for people and families. I tell them that’s what’s happening. I had one guy who was insisting on keeping his bathroom in this one spot, which was the worst spot for it. I was trying all sorts of different ways to get it the way we wanted to plan it, and finally the developer said, “Well, that’s one of your auspicious corners over there and putting the toilet there is one of the worst things you can do.” The homeowner didn’t really question it but simply said, “Oh – okay,” and was fine with it. He may not have believed it but he certainly wasn’t going to tempt it!

With regards to the Wintringham projects, I’m satisfied that the results are what I would like for the short term – the results are speaking for themselves. I’ll be interested to see what the more long-term results are, and that can come mainly from observational feedback from the staff.