The Only Way Out is Through: Architecture, Building and Our Entangled Present in Gary, Indiana

Connor Daniel Gravelle (MArch II ’25)

Architecture frequently operates in abstraction. From drawings to models, our discipline functions mostly through intermediating media. Buildings, however, are innately material. Buildings bind architecture to the world, entangling it in issues of material, labor, and ecology with which it has historically been ill-equipped to contend.

This thesis explores Gary, Indiana—a place defined by the afterlife of such occlusions. Responsible for the steel that made not only Chicago but the nation, Gary was created in the image of industrial modernity, but the relations that sustained its prosperity no longer hold water. Changes in the American economy and the stagnation of the domestic steel industry leave Gary in a state of precarity familiar throughout the Rust Belt.

This project imagines a (not entirely unfathomable) bankruptcy of US Steel in the near future, unfurling the social and ecological processes that could be undertaken to remediate its sprawling facility in Gary. The thesis unfolds through a series of studies into the histories, construction techniques, and material qualities enmeshing architecture and steel, envisioning a reorganization of the equipment and skilled labor left in the wake of US Steel’s insolvency to construct, operate, and eventually repurpose a facility for dismantling, recasting, and reusing Gary’s centerpiece factory in an act of civic and environmental remediation. US Steel’s plant, after all, is itself made of steel, and steel is infinitely recyclable.

If architecture is as much recasting of iron ore into steel as it is the recasting of relations between people and land, what agency do buildings have to rewire how we relate to our entangled present?