The building is the same. The problem is not.

Mining

The three buildings that decide a mining project are the crushing hall, the conveyor gallery, and the maintenance bay. Each has one dominant problem.

The crushing hall is sized by maintenance, not tonnage. The opening that has to be lifted out of a crusher eventually defines the hook height and the clear space beside the machine. Owners size it from throughput, which is the wrong number.

The conveyor gallery is restrained at one tower. A gallery that runs hundreds of metres expands and contracts. If it is tied at every tower, the movement has nowhere to go and the connections take it. One fixed point, the rest sliding.

The maintenance bay is sized by the crane rail level. Not the span, not the floor. The height at which the hook must work is the number you cannot raise afterwards, because raising it changes the columns, the rail beam and often the foundation.

Food processing

Water is the whole story. A food hall is washed down, often daily, and the water goes wherever the detailing allows.

The traps are consistent: a floor that drains toward a column instead of away from it; a steel base plate sitting in a puddle for twenty years; penetrations cut on site with no sleeve and no seal; insulation that terminates above the washdown line instead of below it.

None of these are fabrication problems. All of them are decided on the drawing, before the frame is ordered. The visible symptom arrives years later as corrosion at the base of a column, and by then the fix is expensive.

Cold storage

A cold store is not a steel building with panels on it. It is a sealed envelope that happens to have a steel frame inside it, and the frame must not become a thermal bridge or a vapour path.

The expensive mistakes are almost always at junctions: where the insulated floor meets the wall, where the ceiling meets the wall, where a door threshold meets the floor. These are details, they are drawn once, and they are almost impossible to correct once the panels are on.

A second, quieter problem: the building designed for frozen storage and then used for chilled, or the reverse. The envelope assumptions change with the temperature, so tell whoever is sizing it which one you actually intend to run.

Logistics and warehousing

Warehouse buildings are decided by traffic, not by area. How many trucks arrive at peak, whether they reverse or drive through, whether a forklift enters the container or the container comes to the forklift.

Level entry and a raised dock are both correct, for different operations. Level entry is right when you handle few trucks and use tail lifts. A raised dock is right when you handle many, and when the floor height can be set once and kept. Choosing the cheaper one for the wrong operation produces a building that is permanently slow.

Column spacing is the second decision. Columns on racking lines cost nothing in usable area. Columns in a turning circle cost every day.

Energy and chemicals

Two buildings here are routinely underestimated: the pipe yard and the rack.

The pipe yard’s clear height is set by the longest joint, not by the stack. If a joint has to be lifted over the top of a stack, the crane hook path sets the eave height, and the stack height is almost irrelevant.

The rack is a building. A pipe rack that carries lines, cable trays and walkways across a site has columns, beams and bracing exactly like a shed, and it is designed with the same care. It gets treated as pipework and then behaves like structure.

Fire separation and drainage for spilled product complete the list. Both are cheap at design and painful afterwards.

Manufacturing halls

Assembly, appliance, machining, packaging — these look alike and are not. What separates them is the service load on the roof: a suspended conveyor, a monorail, an air handling unit, a solar array, or nothing at all.

An appliance plant with a monorail running the length of the hall is a different frame from a machining hall of the same size with nothing overhead. If the process is not fixed when the building is ordered, say so — and ask for the roof to be designed with an allowance rather than to the minimum.