Steel, skyscrapers and Chicago’s explosive growth at the fin de siècle—it’s a story we know by heart. In architecture’s history, the steel skeleton’s brisk ascension from a speculative pipe dream to a standard so ubiquitous as to be almost invisible is frequently recounted. What, however, does our understanding of this serendipitous intersection between capital, engineering and real estate in Chicago at the dawn of the 20th century leave out?

This exhibition looks to unpack the spatial consequences of this overlooked history, reenvisioning the Chicago Frame through the simple lens of its material composition: steel. Where did the steel necessary to abet Chicago’s rapid verticalization come from? Whose land begot its production? Moreover, what industrial apparatus was necessary to transform iron ore, the raw matter at the heart of steel, into a malleable building material? In seeking the unseen headsprings of Chicago’s steel, this project focuses on the city of Gary, Indiana, a monument to the industrial imaginary built entirely under the egis of US Steel—America’s most prodigious early 20th-century conglomerate and the first billion-dollar corporation in the history of capitalism.

After more than a century of steel production, the relations to labor, ecology and land on which Gary was built have become untenable, and a future is not inconceivable in which US Steel goes out of business. This exhibition speculates on just such a scenario, probing the material afterlife of the American steel industry at its ground zero to envision the material conditions of the Rust Belt factory town not as the tarnished ruins of a bygone modernity but imbued with the radical ingredients for a less extractive, rehabilitative future.

Connor Gravelle (MArch II ’25)