Hydrogeography-Based Fabric Assessment of Heritage Warehouses

Abstract

Brick warehouses represent a form of heritage at a different level of reactivation. Interdisciplinary exploration of social, cultural, and economic development has raised questions regarding the roles these buildings played in the past and how the heritage continued to evolve with the surrounding fabric. This study aimed to explore the spatiotemporal relationship between nine red brick warehouses and the historical development of the urban fabric in the Taipei metropolitan area, Taiwan. The relationship was defined by the quantitative trend assessment of the architecture, river, tributaries, and railroad, based on maps created between 1890 and 2020. The interactions between warehouses and fabric comprised single, meta, and determining indicators. The interactions evolved between two trends comprising intersections, maturity, and fluctuation. The consistent development of the architecture’s ascending trend was used as a reference indicator, by a relative scale to the fully developed stage of 100%. The meta-relationship between trends had a higher percentage and a greater occurrence closer to the present. The percentage totaled 67.74% after 1945 and remained above 50%, another indicator of the evolving frequency and intensity. The nine warehouses, which were part of a tributary branch system, created 11 intersections between 1950 and 1990. We concluded that the former active, supportive role of warehouses changed to a passive role, corresponding to the instrumentation of all trends. The warehouses functioned as trendsetters and interacted with the fabrics in a sustainable urbanization process. This was caused by role substitution, fabric replacement, degenerated dependence, and a diverted two-way relationship with hydrogeography. A geographic distribution of development was demonstrated from the river mouth inland.