Industrial architecture is the design and construction of buildings with an industrial function.

The demarcation of fields between architecture and engineering is an unresolved issue, so it is common to consider that this activity is part of industrial engineering (which is more properly the design and construction of machinery), civil engineering (which is more properly the design and construction of transport and communications infrastructure)) or mining engineering (in the field of mining).

In the pre-industrial era there were some buildings with an industrial function, notably mills and other agro-industrial storage and processing buildings (wineries, breweries, oil mills, silos, warehouses, etc.) and the naval industry (ancient - facilities of large ports, such as Ostia, Alexandria or Caesarea Maritima - and medieval - Royal Shipyards of Barcelona, ​​Arsenal of Venice -). The royal manufactures typical of the Colbertian phase of mercantilism required the construction of certain industrial facilities, which in some cases were made with criteria of monumentality (Gobelins of Paris, Augarten Porcelain, Royal Tobacco Factory of Seville) that reached extremes of visionary architecture (Salinas Reales de Arc-et-Senans, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, 1775).

With the Industrial Revolution, industrial buildings (workshops, factories and industrial warehouses, chimneys, lead towers),[5]​ steelworks, refineries, power plants"), railway stations, warehouses and port facilities, hangars, etc.) gained great prominence, and were characterized by the application of new technologies (iron and railway architecture), in principle the architecture immediately related to the industry (factories, railway stations, exhibitions, etc.) moved away from its expressive or symbolic nature and took it to the limits of the narrowest utilitarianism,[6]​ which is why in many cases they are pioneers of constructive, conceptual and even aesthetic innovations in contemporary architecture. In Paris, the rue des Immeubles-Industriels real estate project (1973) was one of the first examples of a new type of industrial building (called Immeuble industriel in French) that housed both industrial workshops and apartments.[7]​ The Eiffel Tower is a notable example of monumental industrial architecture. The Bauhaus and the Modern Movement were applied to all types of industrial buildings from the second third of the century.

The constructions of cities were affected by three factors: technological, social and economic changes. This process of change generates a difference in the thinking of the population. The industrial revolution is the beginning of change within the urban area, where it was thought to design a city more for the working society, and urbanism itself, with approaches that ranged from repression () to Manchester liberalism, utopianism, industrial paternalism or Soviet communism. Later urban and industrial planning criteria led to the design of industrial estates. In this way the city begins to take another shape and begins to make use of new construction materials such as iron, steel, concrete and glass.