Into the Graveyard, Alang: A Steel Gantry Turns the World's Largest Ship-Breaking Beach into a Safer Machine

Most architecture about ship breaking stops at the photograph: the beached hull, the smoke, the tiny figures with gas torches. Into the Graveyard, Alang refuses to stop there. It accepts that ships must be dismantled and asks a harder question: if this industry is going to exist, what kind of building should it happen inside? The answer is a vast steel gantry that wraps the vessel during dismantling, paired with modular housing built from shipping containers recovered from the ships themselves. The project treats architecture as safety equipment at the scale of a ship.

Developed as a thesis by Shubham Hankare, the project is sited at Alang on the Gulf of Khambhat in Gujarat, India, the world's largest ship-breaking yard. Vessels arrive here at the end of a 25 to 30 year service life and are beached at high tide, then cut apart by hand. Workers climb more than 35 metres to reach the decks, slice steel plate without protective platforms and carry heavy sections manually, all while exposed to asbestos, oil residue and lead-based paint. Fatalities from falls, explosions and fire recur every year. Off the beach, migrant labourers live in informal settlements known as kholis, with poor sanitation and constant contamination. Hankare frames the thesis around one question: how can sustainable industrial architecture restructure the ship-breaking process to improve environmental, economic and social conditions?

A Tapered Gantry That Replaces the Climb

The section is the clearest statement of intent in the whole set. A tapered steel frame straddles the hull, and instead of workers scaling the ship's own unstable surfaces, they stand on tiered decks attached to the structure. Suspended floors, movable platforms and integrated gantry cranes give access at multiple levels, so the most dangerous act at Alang today, the 35 metre climb, simply disappears from the process. Forklifts and container platforms on the decks show that the frame is not only a scaffold for bodies but a logistics surface for steel.

What makes this more than a large shed is the logic of sequence. Sections are lifted systematically and moved to designated cutting zones, which ends the uncontrolled fall of debris that currently defines the beach. Hankare describes the infrastructure as driven by process, and the drawing supports the claim: the frame reads as a sorting machine with the ship as its input.

Mapping Every Movement from Hull to Auction

Pull back from the hull and the yard becomes a sequence of programmes. This section places the gantry behind a market hall and two container housing blocks, with trees and pedestrians at street level, and it captures the project's reorganisation of Alang into defined zones: the ship-breaking zone, training facilities, an administrative block, an auction market and supporting infrastructure. Docking, cutting, sorting, washing and resale are each given a spatial address rather than spilling across the beach.

Two moves stand out. Training is made mandatory and given its own building, an acknowledgement that safer architecture still depends on skilled people inside it. And recovered machinery, utilities and materials travel by rail-based container systems to an organised auction yard, a direct response to the random dumping that lines the 8 km commercial stretch leading into Alang. Governance also gets a physical home: the administrative block places monitoring on site instead of at a distance, and the structured yard plan is pitched to align with international environmental conventions.

Monumental Steel Against the Shoreline

The render brings the drawings into the atmosphere of the place. Looking into the gantry over a half-dismantled hull, with smoke, cranes and stacked steel plates by the sea, the image does not sanitise ship breaking into something clean and quiet. The work is still heavy, hot and industrial. What changes is the frame around it: the chaos has edges, the plates are stacked rather than scattered, and the cranes do the lifting that backs currently do.

That honesty is a strength. A proposal that pretended Alang could become a tidy campus would be easy to dismiss. By keeping the grit and changing the structure, the project argues that the problem at Alang is not industry itself but the absence of infrastructure.

Container Housing at the Scale of a Person

Set against the gantry, the housing is deliberately small. Repurposed shipping containers salvaged from dismantled ships are reassembled into dormitories, kitchens, sanitation cores and communal terraces, stacked in colourful blocks between the auction market shed and the industrial frame above. The elevational perspective, with a tree and a lawn in the foreground, makes the contrast legible at a glance: the machine looms, but the place where people live has its own scale and its own ground.

The material choice closes a loop that is easy to miss. The same yard that produces the steel also produces the workers' homes, so the act of recycling extends from the ship's structure to its cargo boxes. More importantly, it replaces the kholis with housing that has sanitation built in, which is where dignity at Alang most urgently needs to start. Hankare locates the project's identity in this shift between the human and the industrial, and the drawings earn that claim.

Testing the Cutting Zone in Timber and Render

The final sheet combines renderings with timber model photographs of the cutting zone, the suspended floor and the container housing, along with a close view of a worker cutting steel plate. The model work matters here because the proposal stands or falls on structure: a suspended floor inside a gantry is only convincing if its relationship to the hull and the frame can be understood physically, and the timber studies make that relationship tangible.

The figure of the worker at the plate is a useful reminder of what the project is for. A defined cutting zone also responds to the environmental problem the thesis raises: hazardous runoff into the intertidal zone is almost impossible to control while dismantling remains scattered across an open beach. By pulling the work into designated, structured areas, the project creates the conditions in which that runoff can begin to be contained.

Why This Project Matters

Industrial sites are rarely treated as architectural problems by students, and when they are, the response tends toward either critique or erasure. Hankare's thesis takes a third path. It accepts ship recycling as essential to the global maritime economy, then designs the infrastructure that the industry has never had: a structure that removes the climb, zones that give each stage of dismantling a place, rail links that tame the dumping, and training that treats safety as a skill rather than luck.

The project's real argument lives in its two scales. The gantry shows that architecture can operate as a protective machine around a ship; the container housing shows that the same material stream can produce homes with sanitation and shared terraces for the people doing the work. Holding both in one system, Into the Graveyard, Alang makes a persuasive case that the most consequential architecture is sometimes built where the world sends its discarded objects, and where the people who handle them have been left without any architecture at all.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Shubham Hankare

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Project credits: Into the Graveyard, Alang by Shubham Hankare.