More of this Feature • Hemicycle Designs • Hollyhock House • Read an opposing view

Join the Discussion "Isn't all this feng shui stuff just superstition?" Agree?

Related Resources • Fallingwater • What is Feng Shui? • Feng Shui Links • Frank Lloyd Wright Index

Cast Your Vote • Did Frank Lloyd Wright practice "good feng shui"? • Do his buildings express harmony with nature? • Is there an easy, uncomplicated movement of chi through rooms Wright designed? Take our feng shui poll (and see how others voted)

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Did Frank Lloyd Wright practice "good feng shui"? Do his homes suggest harmony with nature and a positive flow of energy (chi)?

Cate Bramble, a certified traditional feng shui consultant, says NO. Here's why.

According to Cate Bramble...

I accept that Frank Lloyd Wright was an artist, interior and industrial designer, an academic, an architect, and an innovator. What I do not accept is any attempt by poorly-educated revisionists to reverse-engineer Wright's "organic architecture" into some kind of Feng Shui mold.

Wright pioneered living rooms (over parlors), carports (in an age moving from buggies to cars), and open floor plans (the ubiquitous design of post-1980 tract homes). But none of those innovations automatically generate good Feng Shui, and are not inherently imbued with Feng Shui principles. Nor has Wright's organic architecture gracefully weathered the brutal seasons in southern California (wildfire, earthquake, El Niño, financial crisis).

In 1937 Wright coined architecture as "that great living creative spirit which from generation to generation, from age to age, proceeds, persists, creates, according to the nature of man, and his circumstances." His creative genius enabled him to go way beyond the traditional in ways contrary to the ideals and principles of Feng Shui.

Read on for...

Feng Shui Analysis of Wright's Hemicycle Designs -->

Feng Shui Analysis of the Aline Barnsdall House (Hollyhock House) -->

Read an opposing view -->

Carla Lind in The Wright Style says that the man "coaxed Americans out of their boxlike houses," yet rectangular homes are the traditional (and ecologically efficient) architectural form in much of the world (including Europe and premodern China).