Photograph showing Frank Lloyd Wright (center) seated with staff for the Imperial Hotel. Photo dated c. 1920.
While not as consistent as “How tall was Frank Lloyd Wright?”
he said he was 5’8″ [almost 173 cm]
“Did Frank Lloyd Wright know Feng Shui?” is one of those questions people asked me sometimes when I gave tours at Taliesin.
Near as I can figure,
the simple answer is “No”.
Still, people were intrigued by this because Taliesin is so tied to the local land, and Wright was constantly changing its furniture and artifacts, while also changing the building itself.
Okay, Keiran,
wth is Feng Shui?
One of the things that’s interesting is that Wright’s designs often bring to mind the balance of nature and design, and are seen as influenced by the Japanese.
The thing, though, is that: Feng Shui is not Japanese.
It’s a Chinese philosophy.
“Feng shui”, from China, means “wind” and “water”.
It is the belief that one should arrange things for the proper flow of chi (energy).
Apparently, Feng Shui consultants
mentioned here
look at how the Chi moves around your home, based on:
- the position of the home,
- its surroundings,
- the shape of the land and the house,
- the compass location of each room within the home,
- the entrance to that room and the furniture in it, and many more entities, including landscaping
[Essentially all things that we were VERY familiar with at Taliesin].
Back to the consultants:
They look at all of those positions in terms of balance of the complementary and opposite forces of Yin and Yang.
And
These elements are associated with the 5 elements or forces of nature.
While Chinese philosophy
also believes in five elements: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water.
Furthermore,
in Feng Shui the 5 elements correspond to five main organs, which are associated with 5 emotions, 5 sense organs, and various bodily tissues.
This is why
Feng Shui experts believe that arranging these elements can have an effect on your daily life.
[btw, I found most of this information about Feng Shui from this article on the Wayback Machine]
Bonus: you start to see how I learned so many things related to Wright and Taliesin. It was always a matter of “huh – where did that come from?” Someone should hire me as the Taliesin scientist.
So, back to before:
Did Wright know about Feng Shui?
after several tour seasons, I finally screwed up my courage and looked in Wright’s autobiography1 to see if he knew about it.
A boyfriend had Volume 2 of Wright’s Collected Writings so I probably looked it over one day during my weekend.
Working at Taliesin certainly erased my understanding of “getting away from work“
In one part of the autobiography, he talks about his commission for the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.
the photo at the top of this post was taken while he was working on it.
And he writes his observation about Japanese houses.
Since Feng Shui is Chinese, Wright may have been absorbing Japanese Fusei, which is the practice of Feng Shui in Japan.
When I read what you see below
“The benjo or earth-closet is made in the garden and set well away from the ‘devil’s corner,’ and as if to prove to me that nearly every superstition has a basis of sense, that corner I found to be the one from which the prevailing breezes blow.”
Frank Lloyd Wright Collected Writings: 1930-32, volume 2. Edited by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer, introduction by Kenneth Frampton (1992; Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., New York City, 1992), p. 245.
In his description of the benjo, he sees the Japanese home and landscape arranged according to a belief in Gods and devils.
It looked like he intuited some of the underlying principles of Fusei.
So he may have discerned the arrangement in Japan on the sound principles of the way the prevailing winds blow.
But, given what I linked to from the page about Fusei in the blog, Elemental Japan, there isn’t a lot written about the lesser-known Fusei. So it’s hard to think Wright had any direct contact with it or Feng Shui.
After all, we think of Wright’s connection to the East during his commission for the Imperial Hotel (which is why my first thought was to get the photo I put at the top of this post).
And here are a couple of websites I came across where people also looked at Wright and Feng Shui. They also gave their reasons for agreeing whether or not Wright ever heard of Feng Shui:
And this writer believed people really need to study Wright’s inspiration from China:
First posted July 11, 2025
The photograph at the top of this post came from https://www.houzz.com.sg/magazine/the-lasting-influence-of-frank-lloyd-wright-part-1-stsetivw-vs~65812243, and it’s also available in Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan: The Architect’s Other Passion, p. 153.
Notes:
- Seriously, I love the man, but his writing gets exhausting. First of all, he starts his autobiography (which has the title, “An Autobiography”) writing about himself in the third person. And, yes, he’s paying homage to The Autobiography of an Idea, by Louis Sullivan, but he has a way of taking supporting clauses and plopping into the beginning of sentences which you have to chase around until you get to the meaning of them. For example (regarding Japan with Miriam Noel): “That attitude the West finds unbearable, because this practical application of their ancient Shinto religion would see most of our domestic arrangements tumbled out of the windows into the street, a rich harvest for some junk man.”
FLLW, Collected Writings v. 2, p. 246. - Wow – this page was posted in 2003. Cue the scratchy sound of dial-up modems.
