Vastu Shastra, an ancient Indian methodology in architecture, is often used as a panacea to take decisions in architecture. Mr. Sabu Francis gives some thoughts here which can be of use to you ...
Vastu Shastra is not humbug. Unfortunately, it has often been made into one by either misquoting it or putting it out of context. Often you would find fake "Vastu" gurus quoting some religous text and pretending that they have "got" it and we architects haven't.
I have to put aside this innuendo. They often pretend that they have ancient Indian knowledge and by doing so not only are they being very pompous but they are really putting ancient Indian knowledge in a bad light. The knowledge of Vastu existed among very real people -- flesh and blood -- doing real things in ancient India. That includes the whole gamut of stuff people do in a complex society. Without getting into details, I am sure everyone will agree that everything is stickily connected to everything else in a complex world. And so must have been with Vastu then.
Each of us do our work because of the socio-economic-political-emotional-"what-the-wife-told-you-to-do", etc reasons... basically everything is connected to one another. Now if someone in the future took one aspect of that (say my obssesive need to do programming everywhere ) without understanding what the other connections were, and tried to explain something happening in that time in the future, ... well... in computer science terminology, one would say GIGO (garbage-in = garbage-out). So I dont even have to get into the debate of Vastu at all. I can look at it as a black box. I can assume that the black box was doing its job correctly in ancient India -- But unless someone tells me patiently how the connections were happening to other aspects of life then and convinces me that those connections are still valid today, I can safely toss the black box away without losing my dignity as an Indian.
The second aspect (something which is shared by the Vastu guys and deconstructivists) is based on a silly sleight of hand or fallacy; if you want to call it, named rather seriously in Latin as "Non causa pro causa". The fallacy of Non Causa Pro Causa occurs when something is identified as the cause of an event, but it has not actually been shown to be the cause. For example: "I took an aspirin and prayed to God, and my headache disappeared. So God cured me of the headache." (Refer: http://www.infidels.org/news/atheism/logic.html#noncausa )
These types of fallacies are the originators of many superstitions. A variant of the above fallacy is the "Cum hoc ergo propter hoc". The fallacy is to assert that because two events occur together, they must be causally related. It is a fallacy because it ignores other factors that may be the cause(s) of the events. For example; someone may have tripped while stepping outside a door in India (many of which have a raised wooden threshold) and simultaneously he may have observed a black cat passing by -- therefore giving birth to the superstition that it is a bad omen to see a black cat when stepping out for any work.
Coming back to "Non causa pro causa" --- the cause of the event in the case of Vastu, is all this mumbo-jumbo maths the Vastu chaps are using to explain architectural performance. Oops... I did it again. I didn't mean to. Hmm... lets say the maths is all valid and not mumbo-jumbo. But does it constitute a cause that explains the performance of architecture? There have been many famous cases where wrong mathematical explanations had lasted for many, many years without people actually discovering the error. A very elegant example which I am sure all of you would know could be the explanation for the curve of a hanging chain. Many (including Galileo) thought it was a parabola. It wasn't. It is actually a catenary. And when they put up a chain on a suspension bridge, many thought; "ha, I know that one... that's a catenary." But no. That time it was actually a parabola! http://whistleralley.com/hanging/hanging.htm
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