The Pruitt-lgoe Myth

KATHARINE G. BRISTOL, University ofCalifornia, Berkeley

This paper is an effort to debunk the myths associated with the demolition of FEW ARCHITECTURAL IMAGES ARE MORE POWERFUL THAN THE SPECTACLE
the Pruitt-IKoe public housing project. In the seventeen years since its demise,
this project has become a widely recojlnized symbol of architectural failure.
of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project crashing to the ground (Fig-
Anyone remotely familiar with the recent history of American architecture ure 1). Since the trial demolition of three of its buildings in 1972,
knows to associate Pruitt-lgoe with the failure of Hijlh Modernism, and with the Pruitt-Igoe has attained an iconic significance by virtue of its continu-
inadequacy of efforts to provide livable environments for the poor. It is this
association of the project's demolition with the failure of modem architecture
ous use and reuse as a symbol within a series of debates in architec-
that constitutes the core of the Pruitt-lgoe myth. In place of the myth, this rure. In these discussions there is virtual unanimity that the project's
paper offers a brief history of Pruitt-lgoe that demonstrates how its construc- demise demonstrated an architectural failure. When Charles Jencks
tion and mana11ement were shaped by profoundly embedded economic and
political conditions in postwar St. Louis. It then outlines how each successive
announced in 1977 that the demoliton ofPruitt-Igoe represented the
retelling of the Pruitt-lgoe story in both the national and architectural press death of modern architecture, he invoked an interpretation of the
has added new distortions and misinterpretations of the original events. The project that has today gained widespread acceptance. Anyone re-
paper concludes by offering an interpretation of the Pruitt-lgoe myth as
mystification. By placing the responsibility for the failure of public housing on
motely familiar with the recent history of American architecture auto-
designers, the myth shifts attention from the institutional or structural sources matically associates Pruitt-Igoe with the failure of High Modernism,
of public housing problems. and with the inadequacy of efforts to provide livable environments for
the poor.
This version of the Pruitt-Igoe stoty is a myth. At the core of
the myth is the idea that architectural design was responsible for the
demise ofPruitt-Igoe. In the first section of this essay I debunk the
myth by offering a briefhistoty ofPruitt-Igoe from the perspective of
its place within a larger history of urban redevelopment and housing
policy. This history engages the profoundly embedded economic and
political conditions that shaped the construction and management of
Pruitt-Igoe. I then consider how the Pruitt-Igoe myth came to be cre-
ated and disseminated, both by the national press and by architects
and architecture critics, and how each successive retelling of the
Pruitt-Igoe stoty has added new dimensions to the myth. I want to
focus particular attention on one of the most important aspects of the
myth: the alleged connection between the project's failure and the
end of modern architecture. In the final section I argue for an inter-
pretation of the Pruitt-Igoe myth as mystification. By placing there-
1. PruitHgoe demolition. (Courtesy St. Louis Post-Dispatch) sponsibility for the failure of public housing on designers, the myth
shifts attention from the institutional or structural sources of public
housing problems. Simultaneously it legitimates the architecture pro-
fession by implying that deeply embedded social problems are caused,
and therefore solved, by architectural design.

The Pruitt-lgoe story: Public housing and urban redevelopment

Pruitt-Igoe was created under the United States Housing Act of 1949,
which made funds directly available to cities for slum clearance, urban
redevelopment, and public housing. Like many other cities in the
postwar era, St. Louis was experiencing a massive shift of its predomi-
nantly white middle-class population towards the suburbs. At the
same time, central city slums were expanding as poor households
moved into units abandoned by those leaving the city. 1 Located in a
ring immediately surrounding the central business district, these

163 Bristol
slums were racially segregated. Blacks occupied the area immediately D\
north of downtown, while whites tended to live to the south. The
black ghetto expanded particularly fast with the postwar influx of
poor black population from the South. As the growing slums crept ;y
,.. Bc:::J
c
e
7

closer to the central business district, city officials and the local busi-
ness community feared the accompanying decline in property values
would threaten the economic health of downtown real estate. They

~0 E
responded by developing a comprehensive plan to redevelop the wne
immediately surrounding the downtown business core.2
Using the urban redevelopment provisions of the 1949 Hous-
ing Act, St. Louis' Land Clearance and Redevelopment Authority
planned to acquire and clear extensive tracts within the slums and to
sell them at reduced cost to private developers. These redevelopment
projects were slated to accommodate mainly middle-income housing
I

g
I CJ
Cl

f J c:s
t\
and commercial development in an effort to lure the middle class
back to the central city. At the same time, the St. Louis Housing Au-
thority would clear land for the construction of public housing. These
I
_.I 0
projects were intended to provide large numbers of low-rent units to
the poor in order to stem ghetto expansion, and also to accommodate 3. Srte plan. (Courtesy Roger Montgomery)
households displaced by redevelopment and other slum clearance
projects. 3
Pruitt-lgoe was one of these public housing projects. Located velopment officials' expectations that these projects would evenrually
on a 57-acre site on the north side black ghetto, it was one of several come to house not only those displaced by slum clearance for Pruitt-
tracts that had been targeted for slum clearance under the postwar re- Igoe, but also by demolition for redevelopment projects and for future
development plan. In 1950 St. Louis received a federal commitment public housing.
for 5800 public housing units, about half of which were allocated by In 1950 the St. Louis Housing Authority commissioned the
the St. Louis Housing Authority to Pruitt-lgoe. The 2700-unit firm of Leinweber, Yamasaki & Hellmuth to design Pruitt-lgoe. The
project would house 15,000 tenants at densities higher than the origi- architects' task was constrained by the size and location of the site, the
nal slum dwellings. The high density resulted from housing and rede- number of units, and the project density, all of which had been pre-
determined by the St. Louis Housing Authority. Their first design
proposals called for a mixture of high-rise, mid-rise, and walk-up
structures. Though this arrangement was acceptable to the local au-
thority, it exceeded the federal government's maximum allowable cost
per unit. At this point a field officer of the federal Public Housing Ad-
ministration (P.H.A.) intervened and insisted on a scheme using 33
identical eleven-stoty elevator buildings (Figures 2 and 3).4 These de-
sign changes took place in the context of a strict economy and effi-
ciency drive within the P.H.A. Political opposition to the public
housing program was particularly intense in the conservative political
climate of the early 1950s. In addition, the outbreak of the Korean
war had created inflation and materials shortages, and the P.H.A.
found itself in the position of having to justify public housing expen-
ditures to an unsympathetic Congress. 5
Despite the intense pressure for economical design, the archi-
tects devoted a great deal of attention to improving livability in the
2. Aerial view of Pruitt~goe . (Courtesy Missouri Historical Society) high-rise units. One of their strategies was to use two popular new de-

May 1991 JAE 44/ 3 164

 sign features: skip-stop elevators and glazed internal galleries (Figures
4 and 5). These were intended to create "individual neighborhoods"
within each building. The galleries, located on every third floor, were
conceived as "vertical hallways." Skip-stop elevators transported resi-
dents to the gallery level, from which they would walk to their apan-
ments. Laundry and storage rooms also opened off the galleries.
When Pruitt-lgoe was published in the Architectural Forum and Ar-
chitectural Record, 6 it was these specific design features that received
the most attention. The Architectural Record praised the skip-stop el-
evators and galleries as innovative compensations for the shortcom-
ings of the high-rise housing form:

Since all of these are, under federal legislation, combined low-

4. View of a Pruitt~goe building. (Courtesy Missouri Historical
Society) rent housing and slum-clearance projects, located near the hean
of the city, a high-rise, high-density solution was inescapable,
and the problem was how to plan a high-rise project on a huge
scale, and still provide, to the greatest extent possible under
present legislation, communities with individual scale and char-
acter which would avoid the "project" atmosphere so often
criticized. 7

Even after the architects had switched to an all high-rise

scheme, they faced continued pressure from the Public Housing Ad-
ministration to keep costs to a bare minimum. In a 1975 study of the
St. Louis Housing Authority's expenditures on Pruitt-lgoe, political
scientist Eugene Meehan analyzed the extent to which these budget
constraints affected the final design. In addition to the elimination of
amenities, such as children's play areas, landscaping, and ground-floor
bathrooms, the cost cutting targeted points of contact between the
tenants and the living units. "The quality of the hardware was so poor
that doorknobs and locks were broken on initial use....Windowpanes
were blown from inadequate frames by wind pressure. In the kitch-
ens, cabinets were made of the thinnest plywood possible."8
Pruitt-lgoe was completed in 1954. Though originally con-
ceived as two segregated sections (Pruitt for blacks and lgoe for
whites), a Supreme Court decision handed down that same year
forced desegregation. Attempts at integration failed, however, and
5. Diagrammatic section. (Courtesy Roger Montgomery)
Pruitt-lgoe was an exclusively black project virtually from inception.
Overall Pruitt-lgoe's first tenants appeared pleased with their new
housing. Despite the relatively cheap construction quality, the units
still represented a much higher level of amenity than the dilapidated
units they had vacated or been forced to leave.
By 1958, however, conditions had begun to deteriorate. One of
the first signals was a steadily declining occupancy rate. As Roger
Montgomery has persuasively argued, St. Louis' housing officials
failed to anticipate changing postwar demographic trends that dra-

165 Bristol
matically affected the inner-city housing market and threatened the Rise of the Pruitt-lgoe myth
viability of public housing projects. 9 Pruitt-Igoe was conceived at a
time when the demand for low-income housing units in the inner city Clearly there were a number of powerful social and economic factors
had never been higher, due to widespread dislocation caused by slum at play in the rise and fall ofPruitt-lgoe. Yet for most architects the
clearance, urban renewal, and the federal highway program. However, entire story can be reduced to a one-line explanation: The design was
by the time the project opened in 1954, this demand had tapered off. to blame. This interpretation gained its greatest acceptance in the af-
Slow overall metropolitan population growth and the overproduction termath of the project's demolition. The roots of the Pruitt-lgoe
of inexpensive suburban dwellings helped open up the previously myth, however, go back to the first years of the project's history.
tight inner-city rental market to blacks. Many chose to live in inex- The deterioration of Pruitt-Igoe became evident only a few
pensive private dwellings rather than in public housing. Pruitt-lgoe's years after its completion in 1954, and the local press noted as early as
occupancy rate peaked in 1957 at 91% and immediately began to de- 1960 that certain design features exacerbated the project's problemsY
cline. The skip-stop elevators and galleries, far from promoting community
This decline in occupancy directly impacted the St. Louis association, had proved to be opportune environments for violent
Housing Authority's ability to maintain the project, as Eugene crime. Forced to walk through the galleries to reach their apanments,
Meehan has amply demonstrated. 10 Under the 1949 Housing Act, lo- residents were threatened and attacked by gangs, who used these
cal housing authorities were expected to fund their operations and spaces as hangouts. Residents were also frequently attacked in the
maintenance out of rents collected from tenants. In a period of rising elevators.
costs and declining occupancy, the Housing Authority was placed in a This connection between imputed design flaws and Pruitt-
cost-income squeeze that impeded its ability to conduct basic repairs. Igoe's deterioration first came to the attention of a wide audience of
In addition, average tenant income was declining. The project came design professionals in 1965, when the growing notoriety of the
increasingly to be inhabited by the poorest segment of the black project prompted Architectural Forum to publish a second article on
population: primarily female heads of households dependent on pub- Pruitt-lgoe. In "The Case History of a Failure," James Bailey retracted
lic assistance. These demographic shifts and economic pressures re- virtually all of Forum's earlier statements about the project, acknowl-
sulted in chronic neglect of maintenance and mechanical breakdowns. edging that many of the features praised in their 1951 article had
Elevators failed to work and vandalism went unrepaired. In a project proved to be hazards, rather than improvements to the quality oflife:
increasingly inhabited by the poorest and most demoralized segment
of the population, the vandalism came also to be accompanied by in- The undersized elevators are brutally battered, and they reek of
creasing rates of violent crime. urine from children who misjudged the time it takes to reach
The ongoing problems of vandalism, violence, and fiscal insta- their apartments. By stopping only on every third floor, the el-
bility prompted a number of efforts to salvage Pruitt-lgoe. In 1965 evators offer convenient settings for crime .... The galleries are
the first of several federal grants arrived to provide physical rejuvena- anything but cheerful social enclaves. The tenants call them
tion and the establishment of social programs to benefit the residents "gauntlets" through which they must pass to reach their doors.
and to combat further rent arrearages. The programs had little effect: ... Heavy metal grilles now shield the windows, but they were
Occupancy rates continued to decline, crime rates climbed, and rou- installed too late to prevent three children from falling out. The
tine management and maintenance were neglected. In 1969 Pruitt- steam pipes remain exposed both in the galleries and the apart-
Igoe tenants joined residents of two other St. Louis public housing ments, frequently inflicting severe burns. The adjoining laun-
projects in a massive nine-month rent strike. This further depleted the dry rooms are unsafe and little used.... The storage rooms are
Housing Authority's limited financial reserves and aggravated the va- also locked-and empty. They have been robbed of their con-
cancy problem, prompting H.U.D. to consider closing the project. 11 tents so often that tenants refuse to use them. 13
In an effort to determine whether explosion or traditional headache-
ball demolition would be cheaper, all the remaining tenants were To his credit, Bailey tempered his criticism of the architecture by
moved to 11 buildings, and on March 16, 1972 a demolition experi- pointing out that the problems at Pruitt-Igoe went deeper than physi-
ment levelled three buildings in the center of the project. Despite cal design. He mentioned, in particular, the absence of adult males as
some last-minute rehabilitation plans, in 1973 H.U.D. decided to de- heads of households, the project's notoriety, and the deficient man-
molish the rest of the project, and finally finished it off in 1976. agement and maintenance. Nonetheless, Bailey's article laid the faun-

May 1991 JAE 44/3 1 66

dation for a continuous rearticulation of the Pruitt-Igoe story With all the attention being paid to the project's design in the
throughout the late sixties and early seventies as the situation at early 1970s, a strong associative link was forged between architectural
Pruitt-Igoe continued to deteriorate. flaws and Pruitt-lgoe's deterioration. In 1965 James Bailey had taken
The trial demolition of 1972 brought Pruitt-lgoe unprec- care to point out that two of the major causes of the deterioration of
edented attention in the architectural and the national press. Architec- Pruitt-lgoe were chronically inadequate maintenance and the increas-
tural Forum, AlA journal Architecture Plus, and The Architect's journal ing poverty of tenants. By 1972 these crucial elements of the story had
all published articles on the failure of the supposedly innovative de- been all but forgotten in the rush to condemn the architecture. It is
sign features. 14 Life, Time, The Washington Post, and The National the privileging of these design problems over the much more deeply
Observer, among others, reported on the demolition experiment and embedded economic and social ones that constitutes the core of the
pointed to the architecture as one of the contributing causes. 15 These Pruitt-Igoe myth.
articles represent the first appearance of the Pruitt-lgoe myth. No The myth ignores the connection between Pruitt-lgoe's prob-
longer confining their criticism to particular architectural features, lems and the fiscal crisis of the St. Louis Housing Authority, or what
such as the open galleries, the critics now began to relate the project's Eugene Meehan has called the "programmed failure" of American
failure to flaws in the overall approach or design philosophy. The gen- public housing. 19 Political and social ambivalence to public housing
eral theme that emerged was that the architects were insensitive to the had resulted in a token housing program burdened by impossible fis-
needs of the lower class population and were trying to use the design cal management constraints. The federal Public Housing Administra-
to force a middle-class, white, lifestyle on Pruitt-lgoe residents. For tion also impeded public housing efforts by insisting on unrealistically
example, an article in Architecture Plus argued that the design was low construction costs. The myth also omits the subordination of
simply inappropriate for the social structures of the people who were public housing to postwar urban redevelopment programs. Federal
going to live there. George Kassabaum, one of the project architects, dollars helped cities clear unsightly slums and assisted private interests
was quoted as saying, "You had middle class whites like myself de- in developing valuable inner city land. Public housing projects were
signing for an entirely different group." 16 The implication was that confined to the unwanted sites in the heart of the slums, and devel-
low-income urban blacks constituted a tenant group with special oped at high densities to accommodate those displaced by the whole-
needs: They were not instilled with the middle class value of taking sale clearance of poor neighborhoods.
pride in the upkeep of their environment, and they also brought with The myth also ignores the connection between social indiffer-
them certain destructive behaviors. As the Washington Post put it, ence to the poverty of inner city blacks and the decline of Pruitt-lgoe.
there was an "incompatibility between the high-rise structure and the In 1970 sociologist Lee Rainwater wrote Behind Ghetto Walls, based
large poor families who came to inhabit it, only a generation removed on the findings of a massive participant observer study conducted
from the farm." 17 during the mid-1960s at Pruitt-Igoe. 20 Rainwater argued that the vio-
This interpretation of the demise ofPruitt-lgoe received strong lence and vandalism that occurred at the project were an understand-
reinforcement when it appeared in Oscar Newman's Defensible Space able response by its residents to poverty and racial discrimination. In
in the same year as the trial demoliton. This seminal text of the then his view architectural design was neither the cause nor the cure for
emerging discipline of environment and behavior argued that there these problems. Improved housing conditions and other efforts di-
was a direct relationship between physical environments and human rected at changing the behavior of the poor were, in his opinion, use-
behavior. According to Newman, the widespread vandalism and vio- less if not accompanied by efforts to raise their income level.
lence at Pruitt-lgoe resulted from the presence of excessive "indefen- This evidence directly contradicts the Pruitt-lgoe myth by
sible" public space. 18 Corridors were too long and not visible from the demonstrating the significance of the political and economic sources
apartments. The residents did not feel that these spaces "belonged" to ofPruitt-lgoe's decline. In addition, it reveals that the type of argu-
them and so made no effort to maintain or police them. The ment proposed in Defensible Space is a subtle form of blaming the vic-
entryways, located in large, unprotected open plazas, did not allow tim. The idea of defensible space is based on the assumption that
tenants any control over who entered the buildings. Newman further certain "populations" unavoidably bring with them behavioral prob-
argued that by designing public housing in such a way as to provide lems that have to be designed against. This kind of argument does not
an appropriate amount of private, semiprivate, and public space, ar- question why public housing projects tend to be plagued by violent
chitects could reduce violence and vandalism in the environment. crime in the first place. It naturalizes the presence of crime among

167 Bristol
low-income populations rather than seeing it as a product of institu- premise that the Modern movement's architectural and social revolu-
tionalized economic and racial oppression. tion had backfired. Instead of furthering the development of a new
society, "the ciry of modern architecture, both as psychological con-
struct and as physical model, had been rendered tragically
Pruitt-lgoe and the end of Modernism ridiculous ... the city of Ludwig Hibersheimer and Le Corbusier, the
city celebrated by ClAM and advertised by the Athens Charter, the
Despite the extensive evidence of multiple social and economic causes former city of deliverance is everyday found increasingly inad-
ofPruitt-Igoe's deterioration, the Pruitt-Igoe myth has also become a equate."23 Though Rowe and Koetter do not refer to Pruitt-Igoe spe-
truism of the environment and behavior literature. For example, John cifically, the implication of the photograph's inclusion is clear.
Pipkin's Urban Social Space, a standard social-factors textbook, uses Pruitt-Igoe is used as an example of this "city of modern architecture"
Pruitt-Igoe as an example of indefensible space and of the lack of fit whose revolution failed. It presents Pruitt-Igoe as a product of the
between high-rise buildings and lower class social structure. "In social ideas of Hibersheimer, Le Corbusier, and ClAM and implicates the
terms, public housing has been a failure. Social structures have disin- inadequacy of their ideas in the demolition of the project.
tegrated in the desolate high-rise settings .... Many projects are ripe for Only one year after the publication of Collage City, Charles
demolition. One of the most notorious ... was Pruitt-Igoe. When built, Jencks further advanced this interpretation in The Language ofPost
it won an architectural prize, but. .. it epitomized the ills of public Modern Architecture. In the introduction to his discussion of
housing." 21 Postmodernism, Jencks asserted that the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe
This passage is notable because it illustrates one particular ex- represents the death of modern architecture. Like Rowe and Koetter,
ample of how the Pruitt-Igoe myth has grown by incorporating mis- he associated Pruitt-Igoe with the rationalist principles of ClAM, and
information. Though it is commonly accorded the epithet particularly with the urban design principles ofLe Corbusier. Accord-
"award-winning," Pruitt-Igoe never won any kind of architectural ing to Jencks, even though the project was designed with the inten-
prize. An earlier St. Louis housing project by the same team of archi- tion of instilling good behavior in the tenants, it was incapable of
tects, the John Cochran Garden Apartments, did win two architec- accommodating their social needs:
tural awards. At some point this prize seems to have been incorrectly
attributed to Pruitt-Igoe. This strange memory lapse on the part of Pruitt-Igoe was constructed according to the most progressive
architects in their discussions of Pruitt-Igoe is extremely significant. ideas of ClAM ... and it won an award from the American In-
Beginning in the mid-1970s, Pruitt-Igoe began increasingly to be stitute of Architects when it was designed in 1951. It consisted
used as an illustration of the argument that the International Style was of elegant slab blocks fourteen storeys high, with rational
responsible for the failure of Pruitt-Igoe. The fictitious prize is essen- "streets in the air" (which were safe from cars, but, as it turned
tial to this dimension of the myth, because it paints Pruitt-Igoe as the out, not safe from crime); "sun, space and greenery", which Le
iconic modernist monument. Corbusier called the "three essential joys of urbanism" (instead
The association ofPruitt-Igoe's demise with the perceived fail- of conventional streets, gardens and semi-private space, which
ures of the Modern movement had begun as early as 1972. In the af- he banished). It had a separation of pedestrian and vehicular
termath of the project's demolition, several writers suggested that traffic, the provision of play space, and local amenities such as
insensitivity to residents' needs was typical of modern architecture. laundries, creches and gossip centers-all rational substitutes
The Architect's journal called the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe "the mod- for traditional patterns. 24
ern movement's most grandiloquent failure." 22 With the critique of
Modernism emerging in the 1970s, it was not surprising that a num- These uses of the Pruitt-Igoe symbol added significantly to the
ber of critics and theorists, who can be loosely termed Postmodern, Pruitt-Igoe myth. Like the defensible space argument popularized by
began to use the project in their writing to represent the Modern Oscar Newman, these accounts failed to locate Pruitt-Igoe in its his-
movement. torical context and thereby ignored evidence that economic crisis and
The first important appearance of Pruitt-Igoe in a critique of racial discrimination played the largest role in the project's demise.
Modernism came in 1976 when Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter used Now, they added a set of ideas about the architects' intentions in de-
the photograph of the demolition in their introduction to Collage signing the project. Both accounts presented the project as the ca-
City. This section of the book was devoted to a demonstration of the nonical modernist monument Qencks in particular perpetuating the

May 1991 JAE 44/3 1 68

mistaken idea that it was an award-winning design). They described business interests and city officials were willing to locate projects on
the project as Modernist not only in formal terms, but in political and the urban periphery then the high-density, high-rise projects would
social terms as well, as reflecting an agenda for social engineering. be unnecessary. Bauer criticized Yamasaki less for his architectural
These uses ofPruitt-Igoe misrepresented the designers' inten- views than for his politics; he was too willing to give in to prevailing
tions and the extent to which the architects controlled the project's profit-motivated redevelopment and housing policy.
design. As the summary ofPruitt-Igoe's history demonstrates, much In his statements in this debate, Yamasaki hardly fits the image
of the project's design was determined by the St. Louis Housing Au- of the radical social reformer depicted by the Pruitt-Igoe myth. His
thority and the federal Public Housing Administration. The architects firm did indeed adopt particular design features in order to conform
had no control over the project's isolated location, its excessive densi- to the latest trends and was insensitive to the potential effects of those
ties, the elimination of amenities, or the use of high-rise elevator features. The architects also incorrectly assumed that the galleries
buildings. Their task was limited to providing the form of the indi- would help promote community interaction in what was bound to be
vidual buildings and incorporating as much amenity as possible, given a harsh environment. Yet before making any of these decisions, they
the restricted budget. had agreed to work within the framework of the large-scale, high-rise,
In carrying out this task, the architects did follow the formal high-density project mandated by urban redevelopment practices.
conventions of modern architecture. Pruitt-Igoe was one of Rather than social reformers destroying the public housing program
Leinweber, Yamasaki & Hellmuth's first major commissions, so it is with their megalomaniac designs, the architects were essentially pas-
certain that they wished to make an impression on their architectural sive in their acceptance of the dominant practices of their society.
peers. The glazed galleries combined with skip-stop elevators, the ex- Despite its dubious authenticity or historical accuracy, the
tensive open spaces between the slabs, and the minimalist surface Pruitt-Igoe myth had achieved the status of architectural dogma by
treatment certainly reflected the prevailing interest in Modernism as the late 1970s. The idea that Pruitt-Igoe's failure resulted from the in-
elaborated by ClAM. However, the use of these formal conventions sensitivity of orthodox modernist design found a receptive audience
does not demonstrate that the architects had particular intentions for and became an illustration for many Postmodern and anti-Modern
social reform. In fact, in published statements Minoru Yamasaki ex- texts. Peter Blake, in Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture
pressed doubt that the high-rise form would have a beneficial effect Hasn't Worked, echoed the assertion that Pruitt-Igoe followed "Ville-
on public housing tenants. Radieuse" design ideas. As a result, he argued, there was "no way this
These statements appeared in a series of articles in the journal of depressing project could be made humanly habitable" and communi-
Housing in which Yamasaki engaged in a debate with the progressive ties of high-rises are inherently doomed. 27 It also became a convenient
housing reformer Catherine Bauer. 25 Yamasaki defended high-rise de- symbol for Tom Wolfe to include in his attack on the importing of
sign, not on its architectural merits, but as the best possible response German-inspired 1930s architecture to the United States after World
to what he perceived as the social imperative of slum clearance and the War II. 28 In From Bauhaus to Our House Wolfe repeated the by now
economic necessity for urban redevelopment. Given the high cost of generally accepted fiction that the project was an award winner, and
urban land occupied by slum housing, he argued, it is most economi- then added a fabrication of his own, asserting that in 1971 a general
cally efficient to acquire small parcels and build at high densities. Yet meeting was held at which the residents called for blowing up the
despite its economic advantages, Yamasaki was skeptical of the value buildings. 29
of the high-rise as a form for mass housing: "the low building with
low density is unquestionably more satisfactory than multi-story liv-
ing... .If! had no economic or social limitations, I'd solve all my prob- The Pruitt-lgoe myth as mystification
lems with one-story buildings." 26 He defended high-rise design as the
only way to respond to external economic and policy conditions. Why is the Pruitt-Igoe myth so powerful? There is clearly ample evi-
In her defense of low-rise housing, Catherine Bauer suggested dence that architectural design was but one, and probably the least
that the policy of clearing slums and then rehousing low-income important, of several factors in the demise of the project. Why then
populations in high-density central city projects is not necessarily the has the architecture community been so insistent that the failure of
result of economic imperatives but a conscious choice on the part of Pruitt-Igoe was its own fault?
policy-makers. High-density inner city projects are the result of mak- At one level, the myth can be understood simply as a weapon
ing public housing subordinate to urban redevelopment schemes: If in an ongoing conflict between different factions within the architec-

1 89 Bristol
 ture profession. The two most central critiques of the design ofPruitt- design. By continuing to promote architectural solutions to what are
lgoe have come from successor movements to High Modernism: fundamentally problems of class and race, the myth conceals the
Postmodernism, and environment and behavior. For proponents of complete inadequacy of contemporary public housing policy. It has
these new approaches, such as Oscar Newman or Charles Jencks, quite usefully shifted the blame from the sources of housing policy
Pruitt-lgoe provides a convenient embodiment of all the alleged fail- and placed it on the design professions. By furthering this misconcep-
ings of Modernism. However, though these successors are critical of tion, the myth disguises the causes of the failure of public housing,
the modernist approach to the design of public housing, they do not and also ensures the continued participation of the architecture pro-
question the fundamental notion that it is at the level of design that fession in token and palliative efforts to address the problem of pov-
public housing succeeds or fails. They attribute the problems of pub- erty in America. The myth is a mystification that benefits everyone
lic housing to architectural failure, and propose as a solution a new involved, except those to whom public housing programs are suppos-
approach to design. They do not in any significant way acknowledge edly directed.
the political-economic and social context for the failure ofPruitt-lgoe.
This is because the myth is more than simply the result of debate
within architectural culture: It serves at a much more profound level
the interests of the architecture profession as a whole.
Notes
As we have seen in tracing the rise of the Pruitt-lgoe myth, the I. St. Louis City Plan Commission, Comprehensive City Plan (St. Louis,
architects' version has consistently insisted on the primary significance 1947), pp. 27-34; James Neal Primm, Lion of the Valley (Boulder, CO: Pruett,
1981), pp. 472-473.
of the project's overall design in its demise. This interpretation denies
2. "Progress or Decay? St. Louis Must Choose: The Sordid Housing Story,"
the existence of larger problems endemic to St. Louis' public housing St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 3, 1950, Part Four in a Series.
program. By attributing more causal power to architecture than to 3. For the role played by the public housing program in St. Louis redevel-
flawed policies, crises in the local economy, or to class oppression and opment plans, see Roger Montgomery, "Pruitt-Igoe: Policy Failure or Societal Symp-
racism, the myth conceals the existence of contextual factors structur- tom," in Barry Checkoway and Carl V. Patton, eds., The Metropolitan Midwest:
Policy Problems and Prospects for Change (Urbana: Universiry of Illinois Press, 1985),
ing the architects' decisions and fabricates a central role for architec-
pp. 230-239; and Kate Bristol and Roger Montgomery, 'The Ghost ofPruitt-Igoe"
ture in the success or failure of public housing. It places the architect (paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of
in the position of authority over providing low-income housing for Planning, Buffalo, NY, October 28, 1988). On the relationship of public housing to
the poor. urban renewal more generally, see Mark Weiss, 'The Origins and Legacy of Urban
This presentation of the architect as the figure of authority in Renewal," in P. Clavell, J. Forester, and W. Goldsmith, eds., Urban and Regional
Planning in an Age ofAusterity (New York: Pergamon Press, 1980); Richard 0.
the history of Pruitt-lgoe is reinforced by linking the project's failure
Davies, Housing Reform During the Truman Administration (Columbia: Universiry of
to the defects of High Modernism. The claim that Pruitt-lgoe failed Missouri Press, 1966); and Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and
because it was based on an agenda for social reform, derived from the Housing in Chicago, 1940-1966 (Cambridge: Cambridge U niversiry Press, 1983).
ideas of Le Corbusier and the ClAM, not only presupposes that 4. Eugene Meehan, The Quality ofFederal Policymaking: Programmed Fail-
physical design is central to the success or failure of public housing, ure in Public Housing (Columbia: Universiry of Missouri Press, 1979), p. 71; James
Bailey, 'The Case History of a Failure," Architectural Forum 123 (December 1965):
but also that the design was implemented to carry out the architects'
p. 23.
social agenda. What this obscures is the architects' passivity in the face 5. U.S. Public Housing Administration, Annual Report (Washington, D.C.,
of a much larger agenda that has its roots not in radical social reform, 1951); Davies, Housing Reform, pp. 126-132.
but in the political economy of post-World War II St. Louis and in 6. "Slum Surgery in St. Louis," Architectural Forum 94 (April 1951): pp.
practices of racial segregation. Pruitt-lgoe was shaped by the strategies 128-136; "Four Vast Housing Projects for St. Louis: Hellmuth, Obara and
Kassabaum, Inc.," Architectural Record120 (August 1956): pp. 182-189.
of ghetto containment and inner city revitalization-strategies that
7. "Four Vast Housing Projects for St. Louis," p. 185.
did not emanate from the architects, but rather from the system in 8. Meehan, Quality, p. 71.
which they practice. The Pruitt-lgoe myth therefore not only inflates 9. Montgomery, "Pruitt-Igoe," pp. 235-239.
the power of the architect to effect social change, but it masks the ex- 10. Meehan, Quality, pp. 60-63, 65-67, 74-83.
tent to which the profession is implicated, inextricably, in structures II. In 1965 the U.S. Public Housing Administration (P.H.A.) was incorpo-
rated into the newly created Department of Housing and Urban Development
and practices that it is powerless to change.
(H.U.D.).
Simultaneously with its function of promoting the power of 12. "What's Wrong with High-Rise?," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 14,
the architect, the myth serves to disguise the actual purpose and im- 1960.
plication of public housing by diverting the debate to the question of 13. Bailey, "Case History," pp. 22-23.

May 1991 JAE 44/3 1 70

 14. "St. Louis Blues," Architectural Forum 136 (May 1972): 18; Architect's 22. Architect's journal, p. 180.
journal Ouly 26, 1972); Wilbur Thompson, "Problems that Sprout in the Shadow of 23. Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, MA: MIT
No Growth," A!Ajournal60 (December 1973); 'The Experiment That Failed," Ar- Press, 1976), pp. 4, 6.
chitecture Plus (October 1973). 24. Charles Jencks, The Language ofPost-Modern Architecture (New York:
15. 'The Tragedy ofPruitt-lgoe," Time, December 27, 1971, p. 38; Jerome Rizzoli, 1977), pp. 9-10.
Curry, "Collapse of a Failure," The National Observer, May 20, 1972, p. 24; Andrew 25. Minoru Yamasaki, "High Buildings for Public Housing?" journal of
B. Wilson, "Demolition Marks Ultimate Failure of Pruitt-lgoe Project," Washington Housing 9 (1952): p. 226; Catherine Bauer, "Low Buildings? Catherine Bauer Ques-
Post, August 27, 1973, p. 3. tions Mr. Yamasaki's Arguments," journal ofHousing 9 (1952): p. 227.
16. 'The Experiment That Failed," p. 18. 26. Yamasaki, "High Buildings," p. 226.
17. Wilson, "Demolition," p. 3. 27. Peter Blake, Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture Hasn't
18. Oscar Newman, Defensible Space (New York: Macmillan, 1972) pp. 56- Worked(Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1977), pp. 80-81.
58,66, 77,83,99,101-108,188,207. 28. Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House (New York: Simon and
19. Meehan, Quality, pp. 83-87, 194-198. Schuster, 1981), pp. 73-74.
20. Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls; Black Families in a Federal Slum 29. Actually in the late seventies a local communiry redevelopment group
(Chicago: Aldine Publishing, 1970), pp. 9, 403. that included former Pruitt-lgoe residents made a proposal to buy and renovate four
21. Mark LaGory and John Pipkin, Urban Social Space (Belmont, CA: of the buildings, but were turned down by H.U.D. Mary Comerio, "Pruitt-lgoe and
Wadsworth, 1981), p. 263. Other Stories," journal ofArchitectural Education 34 (Summer, 1981 ): pp. 26-31.

1 71 Bristol