Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Architecture (MArch)
Department
Architecture
First Advisor
Michael Kubo
Second Advisor
Stephanie Rae Lloyd
Third Advisor
Anne Tate
Abstract
This thesis examines the obsolescence of heavy industry as a spatial and infrastructural condition through which the contemporary metropolis can be reimagined. In Chicago, the grain, lumber, steel, and meat industries, along with the railways, rivers, and logistical systems that connected them, produced a first horizon: a metropolitan landscape organized by material production, labor, extraction, and the movement of goods. These industries did not only shape the city physically; they generated forms of collective life through their excesses; heat, smoke, water, neighborhoods, union halls, taverns, and labor communities.
Today, a new industrial force is emerging through data infrastructure. Computation, artificial intelligence, and cloud storage require vast territories of energy, cooling, water, and land, yet they operate through withdrawal, concealment, and minimized labor presence. Unlike the industrial systems that made their byproducts visible within the city, data centers hide their thermodynamic consequences, venting heat, consuming water, and externalizing infrastructure without producing a public realm around them.
Positioning Chicago’s obsolete industrial sites as latent infrastructural vessels, this thesis proposes the construction of a second horizon: a civic and thermodynamic landscape formed through data, heat, water, and the public realm. At South Works, the monumental ore walls become the armature for a new infrastructural ground, where the byproducts of computation are redirected into wetlands, marshes, thermal spaces, and collective programs. Rather than treating obsolescence as vacancy awaiting redevelopment, the project understands it as an inherited spatial intelligence, a ground through which the digital metropolis can become visible, inhabitable, and civic.
Recommended Citation
Labib, Roger, "The Second Horizon" (2026). Masters Theses. 1650.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1650
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