Feng Shui: A Comparison of the Original Concept and Its Current Westernized Version

Feng Shui is an ancient art, science, and philosophy that originated in China 3000 years ago. Followers of Feng Shui believe that they can find a better place or create a better living environment through the Feng Shui principles. Feng Shui is not only popular in China and Asia; its popularity also has dramatically increased in Western countries. Architects, interior designers, and landscape architects in the West have used Feng Shui as a design guideline for pursuing a harmonious living environment for many years. However, the different cultural backgrounds, the lack of basic knowledge of its true principles, and the lack of scientific data have resulted in concerns over the application of Feng Shui in the West. The Black-Sect Tibetan Tantric School of Feng Shui (known as Modern Feng Shui or BTB Feng Shui) is a very common school of Feng Shui in Western culture. The purpose of Modern Feng Shui is to help the discipline become easier to adapt and more suitable for the West and to encourage the application of Feng Shui principles into daily life. However, by trying to simplify its principles, Modern Feng Shui is potentially deviating from the true core wisdom of Feng Shui. Since the popularity of Feng Shui is continuously growing and many different professionals are attempting to apply the discipline to their fields, it is important to understand what is meant by Traditional Feng Shui principles and their core concepts and how to incorporate them. The purpose of this thesis is, first, to discuss the principles and history of Feng Shui, and second, to provide a design metric that follows both the Traditional Feng Shui III principles and BTB Modern Feng Shui principles. Finally, using the Traditional Feng Shui principles and Modern Feng Shui design metrics on the same floor plan, the two different results are compared to understand why the application of Modern Feng Shui might be at risk of losing the core concepts of Traditional Feng Shui