Glossary

The south-east, assigned to fire in Vastu and prescribed for the kitchen. Sound logic for a smoky, wood-fired, chimney-less kitchen — SE morning sun dried the damp space and the breeze cleared smoke from living areas. Weak once you have an induction hob and an exhaust hood: the rule outlived its reason.

The central zone of the plot, kept open in Vastu. Strong climate logic: an open centre becomes a courtyard—a thermal and daylight engine that drives stack ventilation, casts shade, and harvests rain. One of Vastu's best rules.

How a building is turned relative to the sun and prevailing wind. Because India sits between ~8°N and ~37°N, the noon sun is always in the southern sky, so a south/south-west wall takes the most annual heat. Much of Vastu's directional rule-set is orientation logic in cultural language.

An open-to-sky space at the heart of a plan. A genuine thermal and daylight engine: hot air rises and escapes the central void by day, cool air settles by night, the well shades the interior, and rain is harvested. The building-science payoff behind Vastu's open-centre (Brahmasthan) rule.

Air driven through a space by openings on opposite or adjacent walls, carrying heat and humidity out. In much of India the prevailing south-west monsoon wind interacts with the open-NE / closed-SW massing — genuine airflow logic underneath the directional rules.

The north-east corner, treated in Vastu as the most sacred and kept open, low and watery. The physics holds up: in the northern hemisphere NE morning light is soft and cool, so an open NE maximises gentle daylight while mass elsewhere blocks the harsh south-west sun.

Keeping a building comfortable without mechanical air-conditioning — using orientation, mass, shading, courtyards and cross-ventilation. Most of Vastu's defensible (🟢) rules are passive-cooling strategies that predate the vocabulary for them.

Any rule-set governing the ratios of a building — Vastu's ayadi measurements, or modern systems like the Modulor and the structural module. The discipline of a consistent module aids coherence regardless of mysticism (🟢 as practice); the specific ‘lucky’ numbers are convention (🔴).

The math of the sun's position — altitude (height above horizon) and azimuth (compass direction) — for a given latitude, date and time. It's the engine that turns Vastu's directional intuitions into checkable predictions about heat and light.

The arc the sun traces across the sky over a day and a year, set by latitude. Understanding it explains why Vastu's NE-open / SW-heavy pattern works in India — and why the same rules invert in the southern hemisphere, an assumption Vastu never states.

The method this whole course is built on: instead of asking “is Vastu true?”, you ask of every individual rule — what physical claim, if any, sits underneath it, and does building science support that claim? The answer sorts every rule into one of three buckets.

A material's ability to absorb, store and slowly release heat (think thick stone, brick, mud walls). Placing mass on the hot south-west façade buffers afternoon heat and evens out the day–night temperature swing — the real physics behind Vastu's ‘heavy SW’ rule. Note: the logic inverts in cold climates.

The sorting tool used in every lesson. 🟢 Climate logic = a real environmental principle in cultural clothing. 🟡 Plausible-but-contingent = made sense for one era, latitude or material, not universally. 🔴 Convention = no physical claim; cultural or symbolic. Honour green for free, negotiate yellow, respect red as belief.

The square grid (often 8×8 or 9×9) that maps a deity—the Vastu Purusha—onto a plot, assigning each cell a direction and quality. The discipline of designing to a module is good practice and echoes modern structural-bay logic — but the specific cell meanings are convention, not physics.

A traditional Indian body of design and siting principles for buildings and towns, compiled across many texts over centuries. Not a single authored code — different traditions disagree, which itself tells you these are not physical laws but a mix of genuine climate wisdom, dated craft logic, and symbolic convention.

A class of Vastu ‘defects’ — e.g. a door facing a T-junction, a beam over a bed — said to cause misfortune. No airflow, daylight, drainage or structural mechanism supports these. Treat them as belief: respect the client's view, satisfy cheaply or symbolically, never present as engineering.

The course's signature mark. Every rule examined gets a circular stamp — 🟢, 🟡 or 🔴 — with a one-line statement of the physics beside it. A way to read any rule's verdict at a glance without re-arguing it.