How could there be disharmony at Harmony? Well, circumstances change ideals and dreams and “Harmony on the Broadwater” was one of them.
About four years ago in 2006 a unique Australian residential unit complex was proposed at Biggera Waters, Queensland. The development modelled on Feng Shui and becoming Australia’s first Feng Shui residential development based on Feng Shui principles, employing the expertise of a Feng Shui Master.
Selling of the idea to the general public was slow because people perceived the development as an Asian enclave and resisted the sales momentum. The project was remarketed as a “garden paradise” set around a central garden courtyard and each apartment responding to the auspicious Feng Shui potentially on offer, aspirations of health, happiness and prosperity but the vision coming off the rails in the form of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) in 2008.
The Harmony project work suspended as finance was withdrawn leaving some presales in doubt and the developer seeking a partner to revise the project. The project was stalled for about twelve months or so and accordingly, pre sales elapsed, costs escalated and design altered to enable construction to be completed.
This is where the disharmony comes to Harmony. Shortfalls of capital meant shortfalls in landscaping and tuning the Chi for its intended benefits. Shortcuts led to a visual paradise being suspended and it transformed into an ordinary landscape. Chi was unsettled and fleeting, and unit vacancies were too many after completion for the excitement of people mingling and connecting with the landscape. The landscape appears hastily constructed, mundane and sterile, Chi having no home here on completion.
But Chi will come to visit and reside at Harmony. The landscape still conforms to the ideal presented by the Feng Shui Master, conceptualised and imagined and to date elements present, but maturity and connection to them and each other still to come.
The sales staff presenting a grand vision and rightly so because they don’t see the place as disharmonious at all, just waiting for people, their interactions and the gardens evolving to transform Chi into something of a beneficial kind.
Maybe someone else in Australia or elsewhere will try to create the harmonious landscape built on classical Feng Shui. Whether its day will come lies ahead. Chi comes to us through our mind, it’s not something we create on a piece of paper. Sure we can balance a gardens Yin and Yang, five element balance, nullify the Sha Chi influences, infuse my eight elements and in doing so create a place of interest and excitement, mysterious and intrigue and maybe that’s where the Feng Shui landscape of the future will evolve into, an interactive, alive, responsive, functional and naturally sustainable landscape….and harmony coming along for the ride.