This article stems partly from my profession as an architect, partly from that of a Feng Shui consultant and, in another part, also from the fact of being any human being inserted into this society, which sometimes seems to go crazy with inexplicable acts of cruelty and ferocity.

As is well known, reality - any reality - is in equilibrium when the 5 elements (Water, Wood, Fire, Earth and Metal) are in a correct relationship between them, thus allowing the energy of the environment of to flow continuously, to circulate, to make continuously work what we could call "the wheel of life". A bit like saying: everything in its place.

But if we look around, at least in Italy, most of the architectures in which we reside (condominiums, villas and terraced houses) clearly have Earth shapes and often even colors: square plants, cubic shapes, yellow, beige, pale pink shades, Brown.

A detail of great attraction for the purchase of one's own home is the inclusion in the project of these houses with small inserts or even entire walls in exposed brick, which is nothing more than a further strengthening of the Earth 's energy in our dwellings and that - if used in excess - makes them similar to small (and sometimes ridiculous) fortified castles.

Knowing one of the fundamental assertions of Feng Shui, this absolute demand of Earth for our homes must not be surprising: it is in fact nothing more than an instinctive research carried out by the part of animal that still dwells in every human being. It is a derivation of the atavistic choice of the best den, which was dug in the earth, even better in the rock, warm, solid, camouflaged and hidden in the rest of the landscape and sheltered from predators.

Knowing then the meanings of the 5 Elements, it is still not surprising that instinctively they look for houses of Earth : this element in fact represents concepts such as stability, balance, accumulation, abundance, nourishment. Aren't these fundamental characteristics for the place where we have to live, rest, reproduce, relax, lower our guard and evolve serenely?

However, I allow myself to say that the Earth element "not in equilibrium", if it is in excess, creates an exaggerated stability, that is it produces stagnation, lack of evolution, block.

It cannot be excluded that a society too strongly characterized by the Earth Element is therefore a society incapable of moving forward, of thinking about new ways to go.

In essence, it could be said that an excess of Earth makes people unable to choose (every choice that is made in life is in fact a destabilization of the status quo ) and more willing to be controlled and managed, guided, since it does not it is more able to evolve because it is "closed" inside perfect safe and armored boxes, where the stimuli hardly enter and just as hardly come out.

In some ways it could therefore be thought that the large amount of buildings, or entire towns and cities, characterized mainly by the element Earth may have been somehow made to art, in order to numb the population and hold it in a kind of instantaneous, fixed in time and space, with the consequence of being able to better control it given the predictability and repetitiveness of its behaviors.

In all likelihood this device is another characteristic that man - presumably the man of power - carries with him as ancestral knowledge, as an innate heritage, almost inscribed in DNA.

Moreover, the structures of architecture have had millennia to grow and evolve along with the history of humanity and it is now verified (also by environmental psychology) that there are forms and colors that are instinctively more suited to certain types of activities, to an evolution psychic of individuals rather than another.

At this point, however, we need to reiterate that - so that life goes on and so that its energies evolve in a coherent way and flow correctly - there is a need for all five Elements and, where man is forced into a universe of Earth, it is natural that he procures from himself the energies that he lacks, perhaps with violent explosions, with crazy gestures, dictated by a sudden manifestation of one of the other Elements: so here, for example, is the large space given by excessive impulses of emotion typical of Water or those of anger due to the Wood Element.

At this point the question to ask is: the social revolution (understood as the desire to rediscover a new healthier, paradoxically less stable equilibrium, and as the reappropriation of one's own being and one's own way of thinking), can start from architecture, from its forms, its colors and the houses in which we live?

A harmonious but more variegated, diversified urban landscape, representing different archetypes, could save us from the flattening of the most and from the madness of the few?

I believe that we could try, without fear of going against the current and affirming our own diversity, also thanks to the application of Feng Shui.