In 1972 the city of St. Louis began dynamiting the Pruitt-Igoe public housing blocks, a celebrated modernist project of the mid 1950s that had collapsed into vacancy and disrepair within two decades, with the whole complex leveled by 1976. The televised demolitions became the emblem of modernist planning's failure; the critic Charles Jencks called the moment the day modern architecture died, a verdict itself still argued.
Facts
Milestone YearThe first demolitions; clearance of the whole complex ran to 1976. Milestone Date LocationSt. Louis, United States 1 FAQs
Did the failure of Pruitt-Igoe prove that modernist architecture doesn't work?
Not by itself; underfunding and housing policy did more damage than the design.
Not on its own. Charles Jencks famously called the 1972 demolitions the day modern architecture died, but planning historian Katharine Bristol argued in 1991 that chronic underfunding, racially discriminatory occupancy policy and the politics of public housing in postwar St. Louis did far more damage than Minoru Yamasaki's design, and that blaming the architecture alone let the institutions actually responsible escape scrutiny.
Connections
Associated With
Charles Jencks cited the 1972 Pruitt-Igoe demolition as the symbolic death of modern architecture and a spur to postmodern critique.
The case that forced modernist planning to reckon with its failures.
Source Encyclopedia Britannica
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Sources
1. Encyclopedia Britannica
2. Wikipedia
Wikimedia FoundationPruitt-Igoe, Description/History section, first demolition sentenceQuote, Pruitt-Igoe, Description/History section, first demolition sentence
After months of preparation, the first building was demolished with explosives on March 16, 1972.
Dissenting Readings (1 dissenting reading)
Description
In "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth" (Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 44, no. 3, May 1991), planning historian Katharine Bristol argued the popular reading that blames Pruitt-Igoe's collapse on modernist architecture alone is itself a myth: the project's failure owed far more to chronic underfunding, racially discriminatory occupancy and public-housing policy in postwar St. Louis than to Minoru Yamasaki's design, a design-determinist framing that Bristol argued let the institutions actually responsible escape scrutiny.
A dissenting reading, from Katharine BristolWikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation
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