ABSTRACT
At its fullest elaboration, vastu architecture is modernist, particularly in the highly reflexive use of the vastu purusha mandala as a totalising master plan for all aspects of a house-from the major architectural features of exterior form and interior layout down to the smallest detail of the use of colour and the placement of furniture-as ‘a machine for living in’ (Le Corbusier) harmony with the cosmos; and remember the term ‘yantra’ means machine. The problem with modernist architecture is that it assumes a one-way relation between design and use and ‘precise congruence between activities and architecture’ (Rapoport 1990:18).1 Kholagaun Chhetris are not modernist in this sense. They do not deliberately plan, consciously conceptualize, or verbally describe their houses as mandalas. Instead they are ‘vastu architects’ by conventional practice rather than by intentional design, building both their lifeworld and the spaces for it through the everyday use of their houses. They produce their houses as mandalas in the way they orient them auspiciously in terms of the cardinal directions and organize them into a series of concentric zones of increasing purity and vulnerability to the dangers outside their compounds.
