As previously mentioned, if the standards for a traditional Japanese garden or Chinese yuanlin are applied to the Korean residential setting, no garden form as such exists. Thus it is clearly necessary to adopt a completely different standard by which to define the gardens of Korea, and this standard might be termed the “uncultivated” garden. […]
Category: THE GARDEN. AS ARCHITECTURE
The Pyolso Environment
As we have seen, the composition of residences in Choson Korea was directly influenced by Chinese Confucianist political thought, and we can safely conclude that the kind of garden often depicted in Chinese landscape paintings and based in the tradition of retirement from society, was not part of the yangban domestic environment. The only similar […]
Outer Gardens—The Traditional Form Presented to the Outside World
Son’gyojang in Kangnting City, Kangwon Province, is a typical example of the yangban homes built in the provinces toward the end of the Choson period (in this case, a. d. 1816). In floor plan composition, it contains all the elements symbolic of the Korean upper classes at the time. Its outer garden, consisting of a […]
Twitmadang (Rear Garden)—A Private Exterior Space
The area of open ground on the slope behind and north of the anch’ae is called the twitmadang, or the rear garden. It is sometimes located at the top of a series of stepped terraces. The significance of this rear garden lies in its role as an exterior space for the leisure activities of the […]
Prospect and Borrowed Scenery in the Composition of Residences
In Korea it was traditionally believed that the majority of the design decisions involved in laying out a residence could be resolved simply by selecting a suitable site according to the geomantic principles of p’ungsu. The most desirable sites, known as myongdang land, were on southern slopes, as was mentioned earlier, with mountains behind them […]
Borrowed Scenery Versus Prospect
Borrowed scenery is, by Japanese standards, a natural element that forms the background of a picture plane in which the actual garden forms the foreground. In other words, borrowed scenery refers to the intentional incorporation of a distant scenic element—the actual focal point of the garden—against which a garden scene is created in the foreground […]
Layout of Buildings (Li-ji Wu-yu)
Li-ji wu-yu refers to the way in which buildings are to be laid out on the site, and how they are to be constructed. As is indicated by the stipulation “1. Buildings, 2. Flowers and trees, 3. Water and rocks,” the location and position of the various buildings is given highest priority. In Korea, on […]
Defining the Korean Approach to Garden Making
The most straightforward of motivations for making a garden is the desire to recreate nature as realistically as possible within the particular limitations and conditions of a given space. In the opinion of architect and historian Horiguchi Sutemi, “Only when the expression of a garden is such that it encompasses the space does the structure […]
The “Uncultivated” Garden
T he closest Korean equivalent to the type of residence in China that would have its own ting yuan or yuan – lin is the estate of a yangban (civil or military official), and the factors governing the composition of a yangban residence have been examined in the previous chapter. Although the traditional Chinese residence […]
Comparison of Korean with Chinese and Japanese Residences
The composition of the ch’ae interior space and madang garden of traditional Korean dwellings corresponds fairly closely to the hall and courtyard composition in traditional Chinese residences. In the same way as a Korean ch’ae consists of pang and taech’dng (or шаги), with the taech’dng open to the madang garden, the halls of Chinese dwellings […]