Pruitt-Igoe

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The Pruitt-Igoe residential area in St. Louis comprised nearly 2,800 public housing. It existed from the 1950s until its demolition in 1972.

Pruitt-Igoe was a failed project of social housing in St. Louis in the US -Bundesstaat Missouri , which existed from 1955 to the mid-1970s. The complex with its around 2,800 apartments on the edge of the city center was built as part of a large-scale renovation and was intended to improve the living conditions of poorer families in the area. Initially celebrated as a “forward-looking project for urban renewal and poverty reduction”, the occupancy rate fell rapidly within a few years. The large-scale vacancy acted as a breeding ground for vandalism and made the maintenance of the building impossible, which ultimately led to the demolition of the settlement, which received much media attention.

Pruitt-Igoe is widely used in the US as an example of failure in social housing and urban renewal. Most of the comments on this are “tendentious, pointed and political” and blame planning errors, construction defects and an unattractive living environment for the failure.

history

Since 1947, the St. Louis city council had been planning to rebuild the run-down DeSoto-Carr residential area as part of an area renovation . Initially, the population refused to spend public money in a referendum. However, the National Housing Act of 1949 made US government funds available for such projects. However, the participation of the federal government meant that the settlement density was increased several times for cost reasons. The large housing estate was finally planned from 1951 by the architect Minoru Yamasaki , the architect of the World Trade Center and St. Louis Airport . It was named after the World War II African-American fighter pilot Wendell O. Pruitt and the white William L. Igoe , a former congressman. The complex was to be divided into two sections, namely Pruitt for African American residents and Igoe for white residents. The Supreme Court award in the Brown v. However, the Board of Education declared the racial segregation policy to be illegal in 1954, when it was still under construction . For this reason, an integrative settlement approach was pursued when they first came into contact in the same year - it turned out, however, that the white residents moved away from Pruitt-Igoe within two years.

Demolition of a building in the Pruitt Igoe residential area; the demolition was televised.

The large housing estate consisted of 33 eleven-story buildings on an area of ​​23 hectares on the northern edge of St. Louis. The area was bounded to the north by Cass Avenue, to the west by North Jefferson Avenue, to the south by Carr Street and to the east by North 20th Street. In total, the settlement comprised 2,870 apartments, which were built in five years. Within a few years of its construction, the area increasingly fell victim to vandalism, which is now widely used as evidence of the broken windows theory . Large parts of Pruitt-Igoe remained uninhabited, and after several unsuccessful attempts by the city to improve the settlement, demolition was finally decided, which began on March 16, 1972.

Floor plan of the large housing estate in the midst of extensive smaller settlements

The criticism is based on the fact that the adoption of the New York City settlement scheme could not work because of the great social and economic differences. For example, the architect Yamasaki was accused of having built playgrounds only on the basis of citizens' initiatives; Basic social infrastructure is also said to have been created or inspired by the citizens themselves. Another striking example of the plans that were not geared towards the needs of the residents were the elevators: they only stopped on every third floor to force residents to meet in the stairwells and to cultivate neighborly relationships.

Today the site is home to the Gateway Realschule, which plays an important role in promoting science in St. Louis public schools.

Controversy over the project

The reasons for the failure of Pruitt-Igoe are controversial, because similar housing projects in other cities have been successful. In the discussion, ethnic and socio-cultural prejudices often play a role, although it is unclear whether the arguments fit the particular urban culture of St. Louis and its political environment. A study by Harvard University on public housing specifically addressed Pruitt-Igoe.

During Richard Nixon's presidency , the situation was politically instrumentalized and taken as evidence that government influence on urban renewal was fundamentally harmful - ultimately it made it easier to cut programs for the then alleged equality of social classes. The Pruitt-Igoe demolition received special attention in the US media and is now part of popular culture as an anti-stencil. The postmodern architect Charles Jencks noted in 1977 that the demolition marks the day on which postwar modernism will end. Extensive footage of the demolition was in the movie Koyaanisqatsi by Godfrey Reggio processed.

photos

  • Dirty and vandalized community facilities in the abandoned housing estate

  • Destroyed windows in Pruitt-Igoe after the abandonment

  • Carr Square, in the immediate vicinity of Pruitt-Igoe

  • Concept drawing of the community facilities of the residential complex

literature

  • Sabine Horlitz: The Pruitt-Igoe Case: Planning Paradigms, Control Models and Reception of the US Social Housing Project. Dissertation, Free University of Berlin, Berlin 2015.
  • Lee Rainwater: Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum. Aldine Publishing, Chicago 1970 (sociological study on Pruitt Igoe).
  • Elizabeth Birmingham: Reframing the Ruins: Pruitt-Igoe, Structural Racism, and African American Rhetoric as a Space for Cultural Critique. In: positions. Vol. 2.2, 1998.
  • Mary Comerio: Pruitt Igoe and Other Stories. In: Journal of Architectural Education. Vol. 34, No. 4, 1981, pp. 26-31.

Web links

Commons : Pruitt-Igoe  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Sabine Horlitz: Pruitt-Igoe: Icon of Failure? Project description for the dissertation 2008 (no longer available); see. Sabine Horlitz: The Pruitt-Igoe Case: Planning Paradigms, Control Models and Reception of the US Social Housing Project. Dissertation, Free University of Berlin, Berlin 2015.
  2. ↑ Stefanie Hardick: Collapsing Ideals. In: Friday . November 25, 2012, accessed December 2, 2012 .
  3. ^ Charles Jencks : The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. Rizzoli, New York 1977, p. 9: “the day modern architecture died.”

Coordinates: 38 ° 38 ′ 24.5 "  N , 90 ° 12 ′ 32.3"  W.