Pruitt-Igoe Projects: Modernism, Social Control, and the Failure of Public Housing, 1954-1976

Abstract

Completed in 1955 in St. Louis, Missouri, the massive Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex included thirty-three buildings of eleven stories each. However, the complex quickly devolved to the point that city officials chose to dynamite it from 1972 to 1976 because they deemed the complex to be uninhabitable. Primary causes of Pruitt-Igoe's destruction were the ghetto unrest of the mid 1960s and the geographical, racial, and economic division of St. Louis. The destruction of Pruitt-Igoe symbolized the failure of the modernist conception of social control and clearly demonstrated that poverty was too complex for policymakers to address through official means. Regardless of the specific factors of the complex's demise, the fate of the Pruitt-Igoe is not just the story of failed architecture or the failure of urban renewal in one city, but provides insight into the larger context of urban America and the crisis situation of the late Vietnam-War era.