Abstract
The study intends to systematically arrange and classify the museum layouts in terms of their structure of exhibition space. The exhibition space, here, means the whole area where visitors are allowed to move and visit in museums. Through this, I tied to understand the characteristics and trends comparing and analyzing international and national exhibition space layout, and then grope the standard in case of establishing museum. The first criteria is based on the point of view that the typical museum experience is made in the exhibition space. Accordingly, the exhibition space can be grouped into two categories; one is 'room type' consisting mostly of individual rooms as in classical museums, and the other is 'open plan type' consisting free standing walls as in miesian free plan. The second criteria is dependent on the way how visitors move about in exhibition spaces. In other words, museum layouts can be categorized in terms of mutual connection between individual spaces including exhibition spaces and corridor spaces designated for the purpose of moving. consequently, the layouts can be categorized into five groups such as 'free plan', 'linear type', 'room to room', 'room & corridor' and 'composition type'. The third criteria is about the overall structure of museum layouts including such elements as whether it contains a certain type of central major space or not and whether and how the exhibition spaces are connected to it. By applying these classificatory criteria, the study analyzed and classified 90 sample of museum layouts in order to understand clearly and succintly the spatial characteristics and implications contained in them.
