SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA, November 21, 2007: An ancient design philosophy from the East that stresses achieving harmony between home and body is finding its way into the United States. Feng shui? That’s been done. Bay Area, get ready for vaastu shastra. A design framework that comes from ancient Indian Hindu scriptures, vaastu at its heart is the belief that one’s environment is a physical extension of the body, and that home design can affect a person’s health.
Vaastu design is undergoing something of a renaissance in India and remains better known there than in the United States. But anyone familiar with green building techniques and the more-recognized feng shui may be surprised to learn how much vaastu has in common with them. “The idea behind vaastu is to orient rooms toward different positions of the sun at different times of the day, being mindful of the quality of the sunlight and not just the level of solar energy,” says Anthony Lawlor, an architect at Polsky Perlstein Architects in Larkspur and the author of “The Temple in the House: Finding the Sacred in Everyday Architecture.”
Pandit Pravinji, an astrologer and vaastu consultant in Antioch, says that when it comes to vaastu design and an existing home, “You just can’t do everything. But if the home you live in is, say, 70 to 75 percent balanced according to vaastu, you will still get good results.” In selecting his own home, Pravinji notes that some aspects of the existing layout were very favorable, such as the morning sun that streams into his kitchen at breakfast time, and the room where he performs his puja, or daily worship. And he has furnished the home carefully in accordance with vaastu principles to lend it a feeling of spaciousness and quiet: painting the worship room blue to promote meditative calm, for instance.
In the Bay Area, it’s not easy to find a building – residential or commercial – that has been torn down and rebuilt according to vaastu principles. More often than not, people are interested in fixes for an existing home. If they’re lucky, as Pravinji was, their homes might (mostly) conform to vaastu principles without having been designed that way. Otherwise, McCutcheon says, they will be limited to the quick fix, which can limit vaastu’s effectiveness. “There’s no evidence that people are knocking down their homes,” McCutcheon says. “Rather, they’re tinkering with it. Feng shui is actually a much better way to tinker with a building,” he says, because it is more flexible than vaastu, which demands a rigidly prescribed geometric and compass-point approach.