Comparative review of exterior spaces in the Korean hanok and the Italian palazzo: spatial aspects of the madang and the corte

Abstract

For as long as the principles of Korean space have been investigated, the madang has been considered as a central issue. However, scholars tend to define this space as a courtyard in the Western sense. Believing that this leads to a misinterpretation that the madang is equivalent to the Western courtyard, a comparative analysis has been conducted in this study for highlighting their peculiarities and differences. The Korean madang has been compared with the Italian version of the courtyard, the corte, which is considered to be the prototype of the Western notion of this type of space. An investigation has been conducted on residential examples (hanok and palazzo) from the 15(th) to 19(th) centuries and has been summarized through diagrams. This study highlights two fundamental differences between the corte and the madang. First, while the corte is comparable to a regular solid, the madang can be considered as an expandable fluid. Secondly, the corte and the madang have different relationships with the environment surrounding the palazzo and the hanok; the corte is strongly separated from it, whereas the madang is closely linked to it and is almost a part of the natural context in which the building is located.