Feng Shui for Fliers

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There have been plenty of explanations for the problems at Bangkok's trouble-plagued Suvarnabhumi Airport since it opened, after 46 years of planning, last Sept. 28. Sinking swampland and hasty construction, Thai bureaucracy and allegedly corrupt deals by the former Thaksin regime are variously mooted as the causes of everything from cracked runway asphalt to customs delays, cramped toilets, monotonous retail outlets and long lines. But Thai geomancer Mas Kehardthum is convinced he has the real answer: construction was started in the wrong phase of Jupiter. "An improper calculation was made for structures in the city's eastern sector," argues Mas, president of the Feng Shui Research Institute of Thailand and a developer of feng shui programs for Palm handhelds. "The energy can be very disturbed when Jupiter, our largest planet, is playing havoc with magnetic fields."

According to the ancient Chinese practice of geomancy, or feng shui, the placement and shapes of natural features, buildings or even furniture can have positive or negative effects on qi, or life energy. And that applies to airports as much as anything else. "An airport is like the front door to a country," explains Lin Yun, a Chinese-born Grandmaster of Black Sect Tantric Buddhism who founded his own Yun Lin Temple in Berkeley, California. "The proper flow of qi, and designs that bring heaven and earth closer, can affect the nation's entire well-being and economy." (Airports are especially critical for Thailand, given that tourism accounts for 12% of its GDP.)

Jetting frequently from TV appearances in Taiwan to lectures at Harvard, Lin has his own favorite landing spots. He cites Osaka's Kansai International Airport as very positive for its high ceilings. He also likes the much acclaimed Hong Kong International Airport for the generous amount of natural light it allows into the terminal. Lin warns that there can be serious consequences when qi is out of balance. After a fatal accident in 2000 involving a Singapore Airlines plane as it taxied around Taipei's Taoyuan International Airport, Lin was brought in to suggest what he terms "transcendental solutions" to correct flaws in the newly constructed second terminal.

But if feng shui consultations are common in Asia's business world, where they are seen as a kind of insurance, that doesn't mean today's hubs of aviation want to admit publicly how they might supplement their wind charts. The office of famed architect Norman Foster states that no feng shui consultants influenced its design for Hong Kong International Airport, though it believes a feng shui consultant helped with its location, beneath a ridge of peaks and close to a wide expanse of sea—both auspicious features. The Airport Authority Hong Kong declined comment.

Kisho Kurokawa, the innovative Japanese architect who designed Kuala Lumpur's terminal with flowing buttresses reminiscent of desert tents, points out that Arabic sources of design harmony were more important to him than Asian ones. While Singapore's top-rated Changi Airport is praised by Malaysian feng shui guru Joey Yap for entry roads and fronting lawns that properly gather up pools of surrounding qi, the Civil Aviation Authority of Singapore states categorically that it "does not take feng shui into account" in airport designs.

Yap's opinion is that subtle landscaping changes, such as realigning the directions of approach roads, can make big differences to Bangkok's Suvarnabhumi, which was placed on relatively flat, reclaimed wetlands—not the happiest location from a geomantic point of view. Fellow practitioner Mas is convinced that Suvarnabhumi's curved sections of roofing should be redesigned because they "look like waves when there shouldn't be water energy in that sector." But he believes the reopening of Don Muang, Thailand's long-serving facility north of the city, can bring relief not just by reducing flight load but because its terminal's rectangular shape makes for better energy collection. It's a proper gateway, in other words. So far, Suvarnabhumi has been more like a creaky door.