Refraining the ruins: Pruitt‐Igoe, structural racism, and African American rhetoric as a space for cultural critique

In July 1972 the first three buildings of St. Louis's Pruitt‐Igoe were dynamited. Since that time, Pruitt‐Igoe's failure has been described as a design flaw wrought upon the unsophisticated poor by well‐meaning intellectuals. Shadowed by this ascendant myth are issues of race and poverty. Through a framework of rhetorical analysis based on Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s articulation of signifyin(g), I examine Pruitt‐Igoe not as a symbol of the failure of an architectural style, but as a possibility for re‐reading and writing urban texts in ways that critique structural racism and the ways in which architectural systems (like other social systems) reinforce it.