Industrial architecture has been an area of deep interest and investigation for us since 2010. Our work has taken us across industrial zones located in diverse parts of China and Taiwan, where we have carried out the design of bespoke production facilities, technology parks, cutting-edge factory complexes and related amenities, offering us a unique insight into the changing intricacies and potentials of “productive architecture”.
Manufacturing currently accounts for about 16% of the global economy (in GDP terms), and about 14% of global employment (World Bank, n.d.; United Nations Industrial Development Organization, 2024). It represents one key facet of national and urban development policy, and continues to be a key stabilising force underpinning socio-economic growth. In China, the largest global manufacturer, industry and construction together contribute over a third of the national GDP and almost 30% of all employment, with industrial added value alone exceeding U.S. $5.5 trillion (National Bureau of Statistics of China, n.d.; World Bank, n.d.). Even in the US — although widely regarded as a ‘post-industrial’ economic power — manufacturing still accounts for about 10% of the country’s vast GDP, contributing about US$2.9 trillion a year to its national economy (U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, n.d.; National Institute of Standards and Technology, n.d.).
Manufacturing has been an integral part of society for centuries and this looks to continue for as long as humans need products ranging from food and clothes to silicon chips, vehicles and medicine. Yet its architecture and its potential significance are relatively overlooked. While industrial architecture has been a pioneering force within the history of modern architecture, and later in the 1980s amidst the onset of the “high-tech” movement, industrial architectural design is still dominated by limiting conceptions of industry being focused on utilitarianism, cost-effectiveness and technical engineering. Throughout history, industrial facilities have often been utilitarian buildings engineered for the purposes of accommodating machinery and the means of production. Quality of design was not often high on the agenda. Yet fine examples do well to demonstrate that elegance and allure can be found in the generosity of space, the expressive modularity of structure, the efficiency of industrialised materials, and in the clarity of forms underpinned by earnest attention to economy.
Today’s manufacturing industries are different — in many ways safer, cleaner, more efficient, than ever before. They are becoming smarter and more knowledge-intensive. Surpassing the traditional boundaries of production, successful manufacturing firms are moving up the value chain, as described below. They are creating jobs for ordinary workers as well as positions for highly skilled technicians, professionals and scientists. Intensifying environmental and land-use pressures demand that they clean up, become less energy intensive, and adopt new multi-storey forms to maximise space.
Contemporary industrial production and manufacturing as a sector has advanced tremendously alongside globalisation and technological development. Today, even the most advanced economies, such as the U.S. and Germany, all seek to ‘re-industrialise’ or to turbo-boost their ‘smart manufacturing’ (or Industry 4.0) capacities for the future. The ability to manufacture as well as to develop the best products is regarded as a key factor underpinning the future competitiveness of places. Indeed, today’s policy makers regard manufacturing as a major sector to be examined and advanced, to be the focus of long-term investment and strategy. The US Council on Competitiveness (2011) long argued that “manufacturing must be seen as a mechanism for driving innovation. It is a sector that should be viewed as smart, safe, sustainable and surging”. Even in advanced economies, where manufacturing production is supposed to be on the decline, numerous innovations take place in the manufacturing sector. In the US, firms associated with industrial production still employ roughly three-fifths of industrial scientists and engineers.
In this context, we have begun to embrace a different view of this dynamic field, to perceive factories and industrial landscapes as special places embodying the technological content, human capital, and cultural artistry of production. Factories are where and how almost everything in our contemporary society is made, where accumulated technology and craft combine to support our everyday existence. Perhaps, seeing through and acknowledging all their problems, our best factories ought to be celebrated as much as other aspects of our urban environments.
Our mission is to envision and craft for the next generation of industrial architecture, allowing today’s ambitious manufacturing firms and their respective brands to achieve ever higher expectations for the following: smarter production and logistics planning; higher ambitions for energy/resource conservation and sustainability; introducing human comfort and broader social considerations into the design of industrial environments; embodiment of identity, branding and company culture; celebrating industrial environments as places of advanced artistry, craft, and technology.
Underpinning our ideas is a recognition of important paradigm shifts in the nature of manufacturing and their firms. From these new perspectives, practical design ideas can be developed to keep up with the industry’s real-world demands. Indeed, today’s manufacturing firms are not as we knew them, with changing demands for architecture and space. As architects working across the industrial zones of China and Taiwan — different localities with world-class industrial sectors undergoing continual change and vibrant development — we are experiencing first hand these changes, engaging clients and re-thinking the architecture of industry.
Firstly, alongside the shift towards a knowledge-intensive economy, numerous manufacturing firms have upgraded. They are moving up the production value chain, spending more on research, investing in new technologies, extending into front-end product development, or into the realm of branding, customer experience and after-sales services.
Internally speaking, industrial firms are today engaging in more knowledge-driven, inter-disciplinary work, with higher standards expected of workplace environments. Numerous innovations take place in the sector — whether in new materials, new processes, or product applications. In the U.S., manufacturing firms perform more than half of all business R&D (National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, 2022). This ratio reaches over 80% for countries such as China, Japan and Korea (National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics, 2022; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, n.d.).
As firms are engaging a more skilled workforce, everyday operations tend to be characterised by ‘hybrid’ functions. Today’s industrial developments tend to be ‘complexes’ demanding a higher ratio of high-quality research areas, laboratories and office space, as well as showrooms for product exhibits and even recreational amenities including restaurants, canteens, break-out rooms, and multi-activity spaces.
Secondly, there is growing client interest regarding a new cultural dimension to design. As manufacturing supply chains have become global in nature, production chains are longer, more massive and complex. Firms experience the threat of increasing ‘anonymity’ and need to establish new ways to stand out and to assert their individual identities amongst the complex web of corporate culture and branding. Thus, today’s factory operators understand that architecture can be concerned with more than the utility of effective production — it can be imbued with ideas and messages about how companies define themselves, their people and the products they uniquely make.
Manufacturers are also reaching ever more outward to their consumers and into the public realm. Factories carefully orchestrate visitor experiences within specific zones or dedicated visitor centres, welcoming public engagement with segments of the manufacturing process. The place of production can be a medium to convey corporate identity and culture. It may also be a way for firms to affirm long-standing links with their communities and settings.
Required planning densities — i.e. the floor area ratio (FAR) — for industrial sites in China have been steadily raised over the last decade under national control indicators and local densification policies (Ministry of Natural Resources of the People’s Republic of China, 2023). As industrial land’s scarcity becomes a common challenge in both developing and developed countries, designing our industrial facilities at higher densities, across multiple levels, is becoming common practice. This demands a different approach to site and space planning — such as rethinking logistics across multiple levels, devising new ways of stacking functional zones, organising production lines in possibly bottom-up / top-down / or parallel production levels.
Industry still represents a top energy consumer and the source of about one-quarter of global CO₂ emissions (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2022). Cleaner and more sustainable industries are now high on the agenda of policy-makers and governments, and poses a major challenge for the evolution of industrial firms in the future. Growing environmental pressures and costs, alongside evolving legislation and benchmarks, are driving the search for smarter and cleaner operational models.
Numerous industrial developments now attain and showcase sustainability accreditation at the architectural level. To make a difference nevertheless, these should be linked to broader and more important corporate-level operating strategies regarding emissions and resource consumption. Over time, sustainable industry is only viable via greater decoupling from fossil fuels and into low-carbon energy, achieving hyper-resource efficiency via real-time smart-monitoring technologies, demand-side controls and putting into practice circular production principles to minimise waste. Increasingly, this will go beyond just considering LEED or such-like architectural certification of individual buildings, but demand innovations in environmental planning policies, cleaner production technologies, better operating practices as well as business models.
Today, new benchmarks for conserving air and water quality, energy efficiency, and requirements for renewable energy adoption are creating preconditions for the industrial sector that are more challenging and stringent than in the past. The positive evolution of new environmental legislation and sustainability agendas in both developed and developing countries, at the same time as the ever-rising cost of labour, land, water, and energy, generate demand for more sophisticated “engineering plus design solutions” in the field of industrial plant planning. Cross-disciplinary and broad-based sustainability considerations early on within design processes are needed to meet these challenges.
Manufacturing environments are increasingly places where technology and people need to be carefully and mutually assimilated. Factories might be places requiring equal attention to the integration of technology as well as to human comfort and ingenuity. As the economy shifts away from mass production into more complex models of modular customisation and made-to-order production, the nature of industrial work is also changing. Sales & marketing, product design & engineering, and production teams spend more instances working together in order to meet present-day demands for fast product iterations and customisation. As a result, more projects are aiming to create ‘inclusive’ work environments that might foster a ‘collaborative spirit’ — promoting an atmosphere conducive to sharing and exchange.
Despite the increasing impact of automation and (soon) artificial intelligence into the sphere of manufacturing, vast numbers of industrial firms today do not have the resource option for full-on automation — they require human labour and human professional input across a whole range of job tasks that machines do not easily replace.
Indeed, while the adoption of automated production machinery and technology is a trend, there is also a parallel trend that factory managers remain eagerly in search for dedicated and suitably skilled workers, who have higher expectations for work conditions including income, workplace health and safety, quality of environment and career prospects. As employee satisfaction is increasingly a challenge for the future of manufacturing employment, quality of physical environment matters. There is ever more demand for production environments that offer greater comfort, sensory appeal, and which promote employee satisfaction. Workplace conditions matter now in attracting staff, alongside other issues such as pay and career prospects. Thus, natural light and favourable views, recreational spaces and gardens might be incorporated. There is also heightened concern for designs that might foster the “collaborative spirit” — environments that might support more open exchange and effective teamwork — essential as product engineering and production come to rely more on each other for success.
When conditions converge, perhaps the next generation of production environments can even seek to lift our sense, our spirits and to inspire creativity. As we further our deep investigation into this field, these are the major trends and trajectories which we will continue to be attentive to. We regard these forces as pointers for practical innovation and improvement in our work, and also for a new perspective for industrial architecture in general.
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