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Warehouses in urban settings must respond to their immediate surroundings in ways buildings in industrial parks do not. Landscape features are critical to integrating and harmonising multi-storey warehouses with the urban realm, façade, and elevation treatment. This helps to address the scale and nature of neighbouring buildings and the proximity and interface of pedestrians and other street users. Together with aesthetic and contextual considerations, several other design aspects set urban logistic facilities apart from their out-of-town counterparts when considering elevational treatment.

Acoustically, the façade needs to address the escape of operational noise, particularly in mixed-use areas where there may be residential neighbours and the ingress of street noise may be a factor in the design of office elements. The proximity to heavy traffic within the urban setting can also impact ventilation strategies, with fewer opportunities for window openings in office spaces.

Façades offer the potential to contribute to greening the city, and compact sites may offer the only plane on which to provide planting and habitats for increased biodiversity. The large, uninterrupted façades associated with logistic facilities offer a sustained backdrop for such provision. Although, careful selection is required concerning fire and maintenance considerations when incorporating green features. With building façades forming the sole barrier between the building’s contents and the external public realm, appropriate material selection and specification is necessary to ensure robustness and that required security levels are met, particularly at street levels.

The proximity of neighbours in the urban setting means that boundary conditions will likely require façades to be fire-rated. The height of buildings with multi-level occupancies requires more stringent fire performance characteristics for chosen cladding materials to meet regulations. As occupancies will likely be ‘stacked’, cavity barriers and separation between levels within the façade build-up will also be critical.

Multi-storey logistics buildings require distinct structural arrangements to resist significant horizontal and vertical loads, from storing palletised goods to racking systems and moving vehicles such as pallet trucks and forklifts. The selection of a column grid is a balance between achieving a column-free area, which is highly desirable, against significant structure depths to achieve long clear spans.Ìý

The upper floors may also need to consider the support of material-handling equipment (MHE) systems (e.g. robotics) that demand a high level of surface regularity and require a stiff supporting structure to limit in-service deflections. Careful consideration at both the design and construction stages is therefore necessary.

The advantages and disadvantages of steel, concrete, and hybrid frames and floors should be evaluated early in the design process, including fire resistance requirements, robustness/disproportionate collapse and accidental load scenarios.

Considering procurement, delivery times, and buildability in conjunction with whole-life cost and whole-life carbon assessments over a 60-year reference study period is critical.

Vehicles ideally require direct access to loading docks and/or vertical transportation systems to facilitate the seamless movement of goods to/from and within the logistics facility.

Ramped vehicular access, either straight or spiral, can provide direct access to all floor levels. Multiple docks on each floor allow fast and efficient loading, resulting in a high-efficiency rate and throughput capacity.

The adoption of spiral or straight ramps should consider the vehicle type(s) they will serve, for example, courier vans and heavy and/or light goods vehicles (HGV/LGV). Ramp requirements (typical gradients of 1:15) can also influence the floor-to-floor heights between levels. Ramps are very costly and require significant land to allow for manoeuvrability, particularly for heavy goods vehicles, so they require effective space planning and efficient use of land.

Upper floors can be accessed via goods lifts in these warehouses. It’s important to consider the challenges of multi-occupancy warehouses, where the lifts are shared between units and may require regular maintenance. Upper levels can, therefore, be less desired than ground-floor space due to the inconvenience of loading and unloading goods by lifts. Lift access may not be the most efficient or preferred operational outcome for occupiers and may present potential security risks, particularly in multi-tenant facilities.

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Built on constricted sites in urban settings, multi-level and multi-tenanted storage facilities increase fire safety risks. Robust fire safety is therefore critical to addressing these risks and the unique challenges presented, which include:Ìý

• Extended travel distances
• Increased fire compartment area and volume
• Implications for the external wall construction due to their scale and proximity to adjacent site boundariesÌý
• Increased firefighting risks
• Multiple tenants operating across multiple floor levels
• Complex automated storage and retrieval systems and sortation equipment and their impact on means of escape
• High fire loads

Continuous engagement is crucial throughout the project lifecycle, from the very early concept design proposals to completing the detailed design phase of the works. It’s important to critique the design as it develops to understand fire safety issues at each design stage and ensure design coordination across all disciplines.

Understanding the risks and how to mitigate them is critical to developing and implementing an appropriate fire strategy. This involves providing a safe means of escape for building occupants by addressing extensions in travel distance while providing identifiable escape routes. It’s also vital to consider the risks of materials introduced in the building design, such as green living walls and green roofs, whilst adopting materials that resist fire spread. Achieving appropriate levels of structural fire resistance and active and passive fire protection measures in buildings can help safeguard building users, rescue services and the wider community.

Ultimately, the fire strategy defines the approach to addressing fire safety and establishing the fire safety design parameters for a building. It addresses statutory obligations but also serves as a record of the concepts that underpin fire safety within a building, which can assist when preparing fire risk assessments and planning for future building works.