An open museum is an institution that displays collections of buildings and artefacts outside. In the broadest sense, an open museum is any institution that encloses one or more structures, including farm museums, historic house museums, and open-air archaeological museums. Generally, the term open-air museum refers to a museum that specialises in acquiring and re-erecting several old buildings at large outdoor sites, usually in settings of recreated historical landscapes, and often includes living history.
The first open museums were created near the end of the nineteenth century in Scandinavia, and the concept quickly expanded throughout Europe and North America. While early European open-air museums emphasised architecture, subsequent American models highlighted portrayals of daily life, which should be referred to as a “living history museum.” Costumes, antiques, musical or dance performances, and historical reenactments are also included in this museum style.
Furthermore, open-air museums can aid in enhancing awareness of tribal or local cultures while also preserving their traditions. Moreover, the popularity of these museums may reflect the importance people play in history and diversity in an era of rapid industrialisation and globalisation.
Living history
The Old Town of Aarhus, Denmark, is regarded as the world’s oldest open museum focusing on architecture. There are three types: relocating old buildings to one central location, reconstructing the monumental buildings in designated areas, and creating a museum around the monumental buildings.
The Old Town in Aarhus, Denmark, is an open-air village museum with 75 historical structures from 20 townships. The museum opened for the first time in 1914 as the world’s first open-air museum of its kind, and it is now one of only a few Danish museums outside of Copenhagen, serving over 3.5 million visitors every year.
The museum buildings are structured into a remote town of mostly half-timbered dwellings built in various regions of the country between 1550 and the late 1800s and were relocated to Aarhus during the 1900s. There are 27 rooms, chambers, or kitchens in all, as well as 34 workshops, ten grocers or shops, five historical gardens, a post office, a customs office, a school, and a theatre.
The major attraction is the village itself, although most of the buildings are open to visitors; rooms are either furnished in the original medieval style or organised into major exhibits, of which there are five regulars with various themes. The appearance of a “living” village is enhanced by the abundance of shops, restaurants, and workshops scattered around the community, as well as museum employees acting as ordinary village residents like a merchant, a blacksmith, and perhaps other professionals.
Creating one of a kind
The North American open-air museum, often referred to as a living history museum, had a different, slightly later genesis than the European open-air museum, and the visitor experience differs. Open-air museums in North America generally include interpreters who dress in period costumes and perform period crafts and everyday tasks. As a result, the living museum is considered an attempt to recreate the conditions of a culture, natural environment, or historical time to the greatest extent possible.
The intention is total immersion, with displays allowing visitors to feel that specific culture, location, or historical period through their physical senses.
Preserving the past
Korean Folk Village, nestled in the forests of Yongin, a suburb to the south of Seoul, is a museum of over 200 Korean traditional dwellings and other structures that have been refurbished or relocated from different regions of the country. The village was founded in 1974 as a response to Korea’s rapid modernisation of the 1960s, a period when not only was much of Korea’s architectural history being damaged, but traditional lifestyles were giving way to contemporary forms of living. Stepping into a Korean Folk Village is like stepping back several hundred years. It is composed of about a hundred traditional Korean houses and structures.
The majority of the structures in the Village were restored or built traditionally. Some houses were converted into craft shops and settings for folklore performances. Koreans prioritised harmony with their natural surroundings during the Joseon Dynasty, a principle that has been transferred to Korean Folk Village, where the surrounding hills, forests, and streams are as much a part of the community as the buildings themselves.
Koreans built their villages to represent the social order of the time, guided by Confucianism’s principles and values. One will see both the majestic tile-roofed palaces of the yangban (the scholar elite) and the humbler straw-roofed cottages of ordinary people. With 270 buildings on exhibit and nine ateliers, KFV allows visitors to explore the architectural peculiarities of Joseon-period residences from various parts of the country. There are also old government buildings where authorities managed communities and enforced the law, temples and shrines where locals sought spiritual consolation, school buildings where students learnt Confucianism principles, and other everyday locations.
There are nine workshops among the residences where one may witness artisans working on traditional crafts such as metallurgy, ceramics, bamboo craft, mask making, and natural dyeing. Through hands-on classes, one can even try some of these crafts.
Various exhibition halls offer a single view of folk culture at the Korean Folk Village. It has seven traditional folk exhibition halls with 860 cultural objects, nine international folk exhibition halls with around 3,000 cultural artefacts, an earthenware exhibition hall, and a masked dance exhibition hall.
References:
About KFV: Korean Folk Village About KFV | Korean folk village. Available at: https://www.koreanfolk.co.kr/multi/english/about/about.asp (Accessed: December 11, 2022).
Journey 해외문화홍보원. Available at: https://www.kocis.go.kr/eng/webzine/202112/sub02.html#a (Accessed: December 11, 2022).
Kim, J.-H. and Jeon, B.-H. (2010) “Development of Korean folk village in 1970s and its historical meaning,” Journal of the Korean housing association, 21(6), pp. 31–42. Available at: https://doi.org/10.6107/jkha.2010.21.6.031.
Open Air Museum Visit the main page. Available at: https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Open_air_museum (Accessed: December 11, 2022).
Open-air museum (2022) Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open-air_museum (Accessed: December 11, 2022).
