A Study on the Characteristics of Korean Townscape in Perspective of the Oriental World View

동양적 세계관의 관점에서 본 한국도시경관의 특성

It has been generally agreed that the city form especially in the preindustrial age resembled their own world view, either in the western or the eastern cultural sphere. So, we aimed to redefine the characteristics of oriental world views compared with the western one, in order to find the relative nature of the Korean townscapes. It is said that the both world views(of western and oriental) are composed of the contrastive binary concepts in common, but there seems to have been nearly contrary differences in these two world views. Wheareas the former was based on the passively segregational and oppositional dualism, the latter, on the dynamically harmonious and complementary dualism, called generally as 'Yin(陰) and Yang(陽)'. Thus, the oriental world view can be thought as the 'philosophy of the relationship', which aim to unify the dualism ultimately with the help of this relationship. So, we can assume a certain third and intermediate concept between these dual concepts of the world view, which can unify these two into the one holistic whole. And the focuses of the most traditional oriental philosophies were concentrated on this, so called, 'the third concept', namely Taoistic 'Tochu(道樞)', Buddhistic 'Kong(空)' or Confucian 'Chung(中)'. And this triple concept, including the third one, of the oriental world view revealed a more concrete form of the cosmological relationship, as the triple structure; 'Heaven(天), Earth(地), and Man(人)', in which the 'Man' is thought as the middle or the center of the world. In this manner, we could found this oriental 'triple world view' was revealed in the real topology of most places in the Korean traditional city and the whole townscape itself. So, in the scale of houses and the roads around them, we can construe the 'Maru(a central board-floored room)' and the 'Madang(a inner court)' as the 'third and intermediate space(中)' between the interior space(陰) and exterior space(陽) in the former, and between the private house(陰) and the public residential road(陽) in the former case, and between the dual parts(陰,陽) of the city representing the contrary social classes and the contrastive visual landscapes. So, we insist that this 'triple world view' represented in the townscape can be one of the most important characteristics of Korean traditional townscape. And this third intermediate spaces, which generate the active social contact and the harmonious relationship among the people, can be the most important cues, as the central places, in the interpretation of the Korean townscapes even in contemporary circumstance, which inherits its spatial and social frame more or less from the preceding one.