Pruitt-Igoe and the End of Modernity

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The federally funded Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis was designed by St. Louis architects George Hellmuth and Minoru Yamasaki in 1951. It was thought to be the epitome of modernist architechture--high-rise, "designed for interaction," and a solution to the problems of urban development and renewal in the middle of the 20th Century. Pruitt-Igoe opened in 1954 and was completed in 1956. Pruitt-Igoe included thirty-three, eleven story buildings on a 35 acre site just north of downtown St. Louis.

See also: A Look Back: Pruitt and Igoe Started Strong, but in the End Failed (local copy), Tim O'Neil, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Posted: Sunday, July 25, 2010 12:10 am

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"These structures were no anomaly. Instead, the Pruitt-Igoe project was the product of a larger vision of St. Louis government and business leaders who wanted to rebuild their city into a Manhattan on the Mississippi. Other redevelopment schemes of the time, for example, placed middle- and high-income residents in buildings that actually rivaled Pruitt-Igoe in height and scale."

"There is, moreover, no evidence that redevelopment plans intended to make an all-black, all-poor enclave at DeSoto Carr, which had been a poor area housing both whites and blacks before it was razed. An early scheme would have produced a majority of middle-income black residents. The final plan designated the Igoe apartments for whites and the Pruitt apartments for blacks. Whites were unwilling to move in, however, so the entire Pruitt-Igoe project soon had only black residents." ("Why They Built the Pruitt-Igoe Project," Alexander von Hoffman, Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University: http://www.soc.iastate.edu/sapp/PruittIgoe.html).

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"The problems were endless: Elevators stopped on only the fourth, seventh and 10th floors. Tenants complained of mice and roaches. Children were exposed to crime and drug use, despite the attempts of their parents to provide a positive environment. No one felt ownership of the green spaces that were designed as recreational areas, so no one took care of them. A mini-city of 10,000 people was stacked into an environment of despair."

"In his 1970 book "Behind Ghetto Walls," sociology professor Lee Rainwater condemned Pruitt-Igoe as a "federally built and supported slum." His study outlined the failure of the housing project, noting that its vacancies, crime, safety concerns and physical deterioration were unsurpassed by any other public housing complex in the nation."

""Pruitt-Igoe condenses into one 57-acre tract all of the problems and difficulties that arise from race and poverty and all of the impotence, indifference and hostility with which our society has so far dealt with these problems," Rainwater wrote." (PRUITT-IGOE HOUSING COMPLEX, By Mary Delach Leonard, Post-Dispatch, 01/13/2004)

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The first building was demolished on March 16, 1972 shortly after 3:00 PM. The demolition of the entire complex was completed in 1976. Today, much of the site still stands vacant, except for the school, Gateway Institute of Technology, located on Jefferson Avenue near Cass Avenue, at the western end of the Pruitt-Igoe tract.

The failure of Pruitt-Igoe represents to many the failure of modernist thinking and high-tech solutions to social problems (rational planning built on objectivist models of human behavior).

Useful Links:

URL: http://www.umsl.edu/~keelr/ pruitt-igoe .html

Owner: Robert O. Keel: rok@umsl.edu

Last Updated: Friday, January 2, 2015 9:24 AM