Pruitt-Igoe, Now

Abstract

What is Pruitt-Igoe, now? Forty years after the cinematic blast of tower C-15, the site of the housing complex still lays fallow, labeled dystopian by postmodern architectural discourse and ignored by contemporary St. Louis politics. In June 2011, a non-profit agency launched an international ideas competition soliciting proposals for this site: Pruitt-Igoe Now. The submissions received and juried suggest what Pruitt-Igoe is, now, to a global community of designers—both literally, as they imagine the future of this allegedly failed utopian site and, unavoidably, metaphorically, as nearly every proposal advances a utopian framework of systems in which architecture takes a secondary or even tertiary role.

Notes

1. Many architectural theorists used Pruitt-Igoe as a symbolic failure to advance their own agendas. Oscar Newman used images of Pruitt-Igoe in its most vandalized, pre-demolition state to argue that its architectural design was the culprit for its failure as it lacked the physical characteristics that would allow the inhabitants to ensure their own security—his theory of defensible space. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter used Pruitt-Igoe in their polemic on postmodern architecture as evidence that the modern architectural movement failed because of its impulses toward social engineering. One year after Collage City was published, Charles Jencks strategically placed a photograph of the implosion of Pruitt-Igoe building C-15 at the beginning of his polemic, The Language of Postmodern Architecture, using it to dramatically announce the demise of modern architecture and the beginning of the postmodern era.

2. Peter Blake, Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture Hasn't Worked (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1977), 154–55.

3. James Bailey, “The Case History of a Failure,” Architectural Forum 123, no. 5 (December 1965): 22–25. The “human problems of the occupants” were the staggering poverty, unemployment, and racial discrimination that the inhabitants of Pruitt-Igoe faced. These human problems, of course, originated in policies such as the Missouri law that prohibited mothers from receiving public assistance for their children if the father lived at home, a law that reduced the adult male population at Pruitt-Igoe to less than 10% of total inhabitants.

4. See Eugene Meehan, Public Housing Policy: Convention versus Reality (New Brunswick, NJ: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University, 1975). Political scientist Meehan argues that the evolution of housing policies from the 1940s to the 1960s were from the outset “programmed for failure.”

5. Mary Comerio, “Pruitt-Igoe and Other Stories,” Journal of Architectural Education 34, no. 4 (Summer 1981): 27. Comerio's is among the very first published essays to draw attention to the sociopolitical, racial, economic, and political turmoil that contributed to the demise of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex.

6. Katharine Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Journal of Architectural Education 44, no. 3 (May 1991): 166. See also “Instant Demolition in a St. Louis Slum,” Life, May 5, 1972, 6–7.

7. Katharine Bristol, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” (note 6), 170.

8. Submissions were to be delivered as either a single 24″ × 36″ layout or a video 120 seconds in length, maximum.

9. Seven jurors—Teddy Cruz (University of California San Diego), Sergio Palleroni (Portland State University, BASIC Initiative), Theaster Gates Jr. (University of Chicago and Founder, Rebuild Foundation), Diana Lind (Next American City), Bob Hansman (Washington University), Joseph Heathcott (The New School), and Sarah Kanouse (University of Iowa)—selected three winning entries: first place, St. Louis Ecological Production Line, Heather Dunbar and Xiaowei R. Wang; second place, Recipe Landscape, Aroussiak Gabrielian and Alison Hirsch; and third place, The Fantastic Pruitt-Igoe! Social Agency Lab—and 31 finalists out of 348 total submissions.

10. Mary Comerio, “Pruitt-Igoe and Other Stories” (note 5), 31.