Notes From A Port City

There is a particular kind of city you can only understand from the water. Today I am crossing the harbour to Cijin on a ferry that costs almost nothing and runs all day. Scooters are packed in around me, engines off, helmets balanced on handlebars. A container ship the size of a city block slides past on the right. The cranes on the far shore look like a font.

Kaohsiung is a port city. The air, the light, a looseness in how the streets hold themselves. Port cities have a register. They are rougher than capitals, more cosmopolitan, less interested in being looked at. The buildings are working buildings before they are anything else. The good ones get converted into galleries and bars about a century after they stop being useful, and everyone agrees this was always the plan.

I am strangely drawn to port cities. I studied in Liverpool. I worked in Rotterdam. Now here I am in Kaohsiung. Three ports, three chapters, the through-line only visible in retrospect.

The Albert Dock opened in Liverpool in 1846, designed by Jesse Hartley, who was the world's first full-time professional dock engineer and built the thing in brick, granite, and cast iron with no structural timber so it would not burn. It closed in 1972 and sat derelict for a decade, until James Stirling converted the north warehouse into Tate Liverpool in 1988. The same building, two architects, 142 years apart. That conversion is the version the rest of the world copied - HafenCity in Hamburg, Kop van Zuid in Rotterdam, Pier-2 in Kaohsiung. The same move, made again and again, each city convinced it was the first.

In 2009, three of us at Liverpool architecture school won a Dragons' Den-style pitch for a James May programme called Toy Stories. The brief was a working bridge across the Pier Head canal, built entirely from Meccano - a toy invented in Liverpool in 1901 and made there until 1979. We won, I think, because we proposed something specific - half bascule, half swing gate, meeting in the middle, the two bridge typologies that defined the working Liverpool docks all the way back to Hartley. Atkins engineered it. Engineering students built it. May walked across. Twenty-three metres long, half a tonne, a hundred thousand pieces.

A few years later, in Rotterdam, the Erasmusbrug took me over the Maas on Friday evenings to drink at the Kop van Zuid bar to the limit of being able to cycle home. Tonight in Kaohsiung, when this ferry lands, I will walk into Pier-2 and find a bar in one of Hartley's grandchildren - a working warehouse turned drinking room - and order something cold.

Fifteen years on, I am exactly the same person doing exactly the same things. Only this time I will be in bed by half nine.

See you next week,
Danny