Pruitt Igoe: Blowing up this St Louis housing project was easier than demolishing the myth it created
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Version 0 of 1. This photograph appeared in a book by architectural critic Charles Jencks as a memento mori of the date and time of modernism’s death, “on July 15, 1972, at 3:32pm (or thereabouts)”. In fact, Jencks got the date wrong, leaving much to wonder about the time, and the accuracy of his accompanying statements. The picture appeared in colour in a May 1972 spread of LIFE magazine (soon to meet its own demise), and on the back cover of architect Oscar Newman’s influential book on design and crime, Defensible Space, in the same year. This was the photograph’s first appearance as visual “evidence” of the failure of high-rise subsidised housing programmes to provide safe and adequate housing for the poor. And it crystallised the Pruitt Igoe myth blaming the St Louis housing complex’s demise on its architecture, and indicting modern architecture and urbanism and its social aspirations more globally. What the photograph doesn’t show is that in fact only three of 33 buildings at the site were demolished at this time, as part of a plan to redesign the complex (they all did eventually come down). Nor does it illustrate the complex confluence of social, political, and economic factors that lay behind the unfortunate physical and living conditions at places like Pruitt Igoe. Scholars have tried to debunk the myth, but the image can be more powerful. It has helped to make the case for the demolition of hundreds of similar complexes around the world, aiding in the fortunes of postmodern housing design, as well as allowing municipalities to shed responsibility for social housing initiatives costly to maintain. The spectacular solution remains a popular if contested one, as evidenced most recently when the city of Glasgow proposed to demolish the Red Road flats live on television to coincide with the Commonwealth Games. Ben Campkin is the author of Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture (IB Tauris, 2013), director of UCL’s Urban Laboratory, senior lecturer in the Bartlett School of Architecture and co-editor of Urban Pamphleteer. Mariana Mogilevich is a historian of architecture and urbanism and Mellon Fellow in architecture, urbanism and the humanities at Princeton University. Rebecca Ross is a graphic and interaction designer and urban historian, senior lecturer at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design and co-editor of Urban Pamphleteer. Find out more about the project at Picturing Place. Which other signs or pictures have shaped how we experience urban places around the world? Share an image that has influenced your city on Twitter using the hashtag#PicturingPlace |