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Garrett Dash Nelson

Comparative Literature 273
Professor Svetlana Boym
5 January 2009

P R U I T T I G O E
Facts and Memories of an American Ruin

Georg Simmel, writing on ruins, grants nature a monopoly on the business of

ruination. He pits the constructive spirit of the human will against the brute, downward-

dragging, corroding, crumbling power of nature,1 locating the ruin at the equilibrium-

point where what was raised by the spirit becomes the object of the same forces which

form the contour of the mountain and the banks of the river.2 While nature is no doubt

historys most prolific ruiner, Simmel forgets the human spirits reflexive role in destroying

its own work. Sometimes a ruin is not a standoff between man and nature but between

man and man, a conflict of spirit against spirit, and a staging point for competition over

the material and semiotic domination of an environment. Because of this, it is possible to

speak not only of the aesthetics of a ruin but of its epistemologies and politics as well.

Such ruins challenge the unitary notion of a constructivist urge in mankind; they exhibit

the perpetual dialectic between thesis and antithesis which drives human life forwards.

One such ruin which figures heavily in the American imagination of modernity,

urbanity, and community is the vanished housing project Pruitt-Igoe, built in St. Louis in

the early 1950s and now no more than a messy plot of trees with an electrical substation.

Pruitt-Igoe was a fairly standard product of the postwar period of American social

planning and urban renewal, designed in a High Modernist style and one of hundreds of

redevelopments across the country aimed at counteracting the emptying-out and

immiseration of city centers. Before long, though, Pruitt-Igoe became a living ruin, turned

rotten and desperate due to the decay and hopelessness of the society inhabiting it. As

occupancy plummeted and the buildings developed the scars of underclass anger and
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racist neglect, the project became an icon of the physical and moral blight of the American

metropolis. Pruitt-Igoes ruination was carried to its endpoint by the city itself in the early

1970s, when the housing authorities chose to raze their own project rather than pursue a

fruitless rehabilitation. In a stunning act of destructive power, the towers were imploded

less than two decades after they were built. That shocking image became the material for

an ideological battle waged over the function of public architecture and the utility of

expert rationality amongst the texture of urban experience. Thus, through all its phases of

ruination, Pruitt-Igoe has been a kind of document, first in bricks and blueprints, then in

graffiti lines and trash heaps, and finally in films and essays, of the different ways of

imagining, executing, and then remembering Modernist ideals. It calls out through history

to signify the past that could have been and the future that never took place.3 It is an

archetypal American ruin.

The etymology of the English ruin lies in the Latin ruere, meaning to fall. Every

building in existence is in the slow process of falling, only some perform their falls more

obviously. We may thus say that ruin is not a classificatory state but a dimensional

quantity: it is not that some buildings are ruins and other buildings are not, but rather

that all buildings display their ruination in different degrees. Falling, of course, is a

motion which is bound together with the language of failure. Make falling proper-definite

and it becomes The Fall, when man turned away from innocence and discovered sin; use

falling in history and it becomes the demise of empires and ideas, the fall of Rome or the

fall of feudalism. The ruined building is thus the evidence of a failuresometimes a

failure of pylons or of a concrete mixture, but just as often a failure of ideology or a

drying-up of human vitality. Then again, we also fall in love. So too are ruins an object of

beauty and passion, surrounded by a holy charmed circle, in Simmels words.4 We

apprehend ruins with a feeling that is not merely intellectual but also sensual.5 And,

just as falling in love famously strips away logic, the mystery of the fallen ruin creates a
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place where ideological polemics can be played outpageants of nostalgic obsession or

disgust.

In 1947, Le Corbusier published The City of To-Morrow and Its Planning, the

now-famous explanation of his plans for a rationalized urban scheme with high-rise

housing units scattered amongst vast green areas. In the story of Pruitt-Igoe, Le

Corbusiers ideas, along with those of other members of the Congrs International

dArchitecture Moderne, play the role of the upward spirit. These ideas constitute the

raw stock of spiritual will which compelled 33 slab towers to materialize and rise above

the slums just outside of downtown St. Louis. Thinkers and artists of Le Corbusiers

school believed that by simplifying and systematizing the physical layout of cities, their

social and community layouts could also be rationalized and improved. It was a

movement not so much about rectilinear, functional buildings as it was about the

rectilinear, functional societies that would be produced by themsocieties where the new

man of the millenium would live healthily and decenctly. The utopian world proffered by

the Modernist ideal was charged with imaginative potential, and those who partook in its

secular apostolicism became convinced that they could rebuild cities in the form of a well-

calibrated but humane machine.

Before the upward spirit of Modernism could reify itself in pavement and concrete,

though, it had to legitimate itself as a viable ideal. Beginning in the 1940s, the United

States underwent two crucial developments that laid the groundwork for urban

rationalizing projects. First, the demographic oscillations caused by the end of the Second

World War, the opening up of new suburban developments and highways, and African-

American in-migration saddled most of the nations cities with major cases of urban

decay. As middle-class whites fled the inner city and the prewar housing stock fell into

disrepair and uninhabitability, impoverished ghettoes began to appear and then grow. At

first the slum problem had no racial boundaries, but as time wore on urban blight took
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on an increasingly racial dimension. Before long, the physical shattering of the city led to

an even more important spiritual shattering: those who lived in cities no longer cared for

them, and those who lived elsewhere feared and detested them.

Second, the increasing power of administrative apparatuses developed during the

New Deal meant that social scientists, urban planners, and other design professionals

began to occupy a new role as technocratic guardians of the public good. A technocracy,

in which experts with privileged access to scientific information about society, is in many

ways the iconic power structure of the first half of the twentieth century. Max Weber

famously suggested that bureaucracy was the axiomatic consequence of modernization.6 It

was one of a few points where Communist, socialist, and capitalist ideologies came into

convergence; each group agreed that expert knowledge and rational planning was a

necessary fuel for the generation of progress. Whether they took the form of French

administrative officers in North Africa or Soviet production commissars, technocratic

operations were always chained to aspirational values of social harmony and

improvement. By 1945, the United States had a Social Security Board, an Agricultural

Adjustment Authority, and Federal Housing Administration, and other bureaucratic

organs dedicated to improving and streamlining society. The nations political faith in the

gospel of technocracy was at its high-water mark.

This combination was fertile ground for the ideology of the Modernist movement.

The desperation of the cities perfectly mirrored in negative the transformative promises of

rational administration. Thus, when the city of St. Louis received money from the 1949

Housing Act to improve living conditions in their blighted downtown by building 5800

public housing units, they embraced the Modernist vocabulary of urban improvement

almost without question. Joseph Darst, elected mayor in 1949, was a member of the new

breed of big-city mayors who believed city centers demanded immediate and massive

public interventions.7 The essence of this ideology is concentrated into the very name of
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the citys urban renewal bureaucracy, the Land Clearance and Redevelopment Authority.

The existing urban environment, which had grown organically and idiosyncratically since

the rise of industrialization around the Civil War, was so utterly rotten, and, more

importantly, so utterly out of line with ideas about progressive rationality, that messy

communities had to be cleared and then redeveloped from scratch. The name indicates not

only the physical clearing which was approved on a vast scale by urban authorities, but

also the cathartic epistemological clearing which it enabled. With an infusion of new

money, new buildings, and, crucially, a new spirit, the city could perform a phoenix-like

sleight-of-hand. It could eviscerate and thus forget its blighted past at the same time that it

constructed its future.

The St. Louis Housing Authority decided to allocate 2700 of the public housing

units from the federal grant package to a 57-acre site located at the center of the black

ghetto on the citys north side. An officer from the federal Public Housing Authority

decided that the project would consist of 33 eleven-story buildings occupying a

superblock carved from the structure of the existing neighborhood.8 The entire

redevelopment, named after the black fighter pilot Wendell Pruitt and Congressman

William Igoe, was to be executed in the perfect Modernist mode: new, clean, and mass-

produced housing blocks set within open space would liberate the poor from the mean,

decrepit life endemic to the broken-down slum neighborhoods.

There is no evidence to indict the architecture team, led by Minoru Yamasaki, of

any malfeasance in the project. Quite the opposite: by every indication, the architects

produced a design which combined the contemporary innovations of the design

community with creative applications individualized to the site. The budget for the project

was quite tight, and so the designers were forced to compromise on a number of issuesa

reminder that every built structure, especially public ones, is a bricolage of the various

intellectual, political, economic, and design forces which animated it. Yamasaki tried to
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mitigate the budgetary concessions with new techniques for fabricating urban community.

Skip-stop elevators combined with galleries were intended to create a sense of

neighborhood in the large, undifferentiated complex. The 1956 review of Pruitt-Igoe in

Architectural Record commended the design for its focus on communities with

individual scale and character which would avoid the project atmosphere so often

criticized.9

One has only to look at the cheerleading publications produced by the city to

comprehend the humanisticand indeed artisticspirit under which they articulated this

rationality. The annual reports of the St. Louis Housing Authority are beautifully

rendered documents, full of photographs of families at play and work, colorful

illustrations of utopian cities, and lusty quotes set in Modernist sans-serif typefaces. They

are textual memorials to the kind of aspirational vitality which invigorated (and also

indoctrinated) the agents of urban change at midcentury. In the 1959 report, a full spread

under the title Oliver Wendell Pruitt Homes: Community Activities shows photos of

children milling about a playground, three girls sewing in a classroom, and a troop of Boy

Scouts on parade, all framed by the crisp rectilinear austerity of the towers. Elsewhere, a

line drawing of the wind blowing factory smoke away from a blooming sunflower

appears between two photographs of Pruitt-Igoe.10 The back cover of the 1963 report

bears a photograph of an integrated youth baseball team with the banner progress

means happiness for the citizens of the community. Inside, the report details the

transformation of St. Louis from ramshackle slums to pleasant, well tended homes and

safe play grounds through the simultaneous deployment of Modernist redevelopment

and intense social-service programs.11

Still, there was no getting around the fact that Pruitt-Igoe was communal housing,

and cheaply-produced communal housing at that. Here the buildingalong with the

ideology it metonymically representedencountered its first stumbling block. If the

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communal apartment can be called a a metaphor of the distinctive Soviet mentality,12 it

is possible to say that the ranch home or the suburban cul-de-sac is a metaphor of the

distinctive American one. Americans have long been under the sway of an overriding

mythological attachment to the single-family home and its attendant ideal of property

ownership. Partly this is due to the cultural belief that Americans are a frontier people

and partly it is due to economic, social, and political conditions which have long

encouraged detached homeownership. But it was not just a material reality. The concept

of owning a home on its own piece of land took on an aspirational and ideational

supersignificance in the values of postwar American life. American Modernists and social

reformers could not overcome the perception that public housing was a kind of

microcosm of the socialist city, as indeed it was in Russia.13 At a time when socialism

and its entire orbit of aesthetic figurations served as a public hate object in American life,

it was doubly difficult to wedge public housing into the system of American values.

It was not long after Pruitt-Igoe was completed that its ruination began. When

Pruitt-Igoe was first planned and built, experts agreed that St. Louis badly needed more

housing to rejuvenate its economy. By 1960, however, so many middle-class whites had

left the city that there was now a large surplus of housing, creating a demand gap which

led to deterioration, devaluation, red-lining, speculation, and finally demolition all

throughout the city.14 The original scheme to house blacks in Pruitt and whites in Igoe

was soon overturned by a desegregation order, and, instead of integrating, the whites

simply left, leaving the entire complex a racially-homogenous ghetto. Economic forces

that extended beyond Pruitt-Igoes boundaries and indeed far beyond St. Louis pinioned

the housing development at the center of a reflexive cycle of impoverishment and ill-use.

Before long, the complex became the dumping ground for all the people nobody wanted

in other projects around the city.15

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The sociologist Lee Rainwater chose Pruitt-Igoe as the location of his study Behind

Ghetto Walls, which documents the life of residents there from 1963 to 1966. During that

time, the complex had only 74% occupancy; there were 2.5 times as many women living

there as men, and 70% of its children were under twelve.16 By this point, the conditions

had become scandalous. Residents complained about atrocious physical conditions, such

as piles of trash, mice, cockroaches, and elevators that perpetually smelled of urine.

Ironically, many residents found the skip-stop elevators and galleries which the architects

had designed to create community cohesion were in fact dangerous, unused places. In

1965, an alarmed Architectural Forum noted that the undersized elevators are brutally

battered the galleries are anything but cheerful social enclaves.17

It was the way people lived in these spaces, however, that concerned Rainwater the

most. Residents complained of fights, drug use, vandalism, and theft. Again and again

they spoke of feeling unsafe and of perpetual defense against their neighbors.18 The

community had broken down and turned on itself. People had been defamiliarized from

traditional residence patterns and kinship structures in a way that did not produce a

critical appreciation of modernity but rather a pathological vacuum occupying

modernitys remainder. The elements which make a city socially habitableneighborhood

tribalism, ontologies of belonging, idiosyncratic microtextures of travel and behavior

had undergone a malign inversion in these vertical cities, becoming mutual suspicion and

spatial negligence.

The technocrats, however, had not given up on Pruitt-Igoe quite yet. In the early

sixties, a Joint Task Force between the Public Housing Administration and the

Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was set up to resuscitate community

planning for concerted services in public housing.19 The 1965 annual report of the St.

Louis housing authority crowed Pruitt-Igoethe past becomes prelude, and laid out a

program of simultaneous spatial and social reordering that included new lighting,
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community centers, landscaping, and picnic areas, all tied to intensified social services.

The page is splashed with pictures of a community hearing, a young girl on the street, an

artists rendering of a new play area, and, finally, the everpresent image of a group of

children playing in front of one of the giant housing units.20 The Modernist spirit was still

trying to keep its symbolic structure coherent, to reaffirm the faith in a progressive world

that would materialize given enough enlightened spatial-social planning. But it was locked

in combat with a countervailing forcenot nature, as in Simmels essay, but other people.

Thus Pruitt-Igoe became an inhabited ruin, balanced in equilibrium between the Panoptic

utopianism of upwards-lifting Modernism and the frenetic decay of a downwards-

dragging broken society.

By the beginning of the 1970s, however, the authorities decided that the city could

no longer continue throwing more planning, more ideas, and, most importantly, more

money at keeping Pruitt-Igoe out of ruination. The project had become a national

embarrassment and a pawn in the fight over federal public housing grants. On March 16,

1972, three buildings were exploded in a test demolition. The remainder followed, and

the entire project was extinguished by 1976.21 It was an act of sheer destructive nihilism.

The city left the land fallow, and today the site hosts a vast tangle of plants, a literal urban

jungle where entropy finally exercises its untrammeled chaos.

In 1977, Charles Jencks published the first edition of The New Paradigm in

Architecture, one of the foundational texts of the postmodern architectural movement. It

begins with a photograph of Pruitt-Igoe collapsing. The copy follows:

Happily, it is possible to date the death of Modern Architecture to a precise

moment in time. Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15,
1972 at 3:32 pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather
several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grce by dynamite.
Without a doubt, the ruins should be kept, the remains should have a preservation
order slapped on them, so that we keep a live memory of this failure in planning
and architecture. Like the folly or the artificial ruinconstructed on the estate of
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an eighteenth-century English eccentric to provide him with instructive reminders

of former vanities and glorieswe should learn to value and protect our former
disasters.22
It was the beginning of Pruitt-Igoes conversion into a ruined memory. In the years that

followed, Pruitt-Igoe became the leitmotif for every manner of assault on the Le Corbusier

tradition of Modernist urbanity at Jenckss suggestion. The towers were not made stand in

for only for a particular aesthetic style, either: postmodernists used the haunting ruin of

Pruitt-Igoe to bludgeon an entire worldview, to discredit and defame the complex of

rationalist assumptions which made projects like Pruitt-Igoe possible. As it bored deeper

into the lexicon of architectural theory, the Pruitt-Igoe image lost connection with the

projects actual history; it ceded its materiality to become a metareferential

mythologization.

Much of Pruitt-Igoes polemical power derived from its sudden fall from standing

ruin to vanished ruin. In both the high drama of its destruction and in the plot arc of its

history, Pruitt-Igoe concatenated together the fragility of totalizing urban systematics and

the almost unlimited destructive capacity of modernity. The demolition of the buildings

was caught in photographs and on film, where Pruitt-Igoe acquired yet another layer of

interpretive potentiality. In the 1982 film Koyaanisqatsi (a rough translation of the Hopi

word for life out of balance), Godfrey Reggio and Ron Fricke made Pruitt-Igoe one of

the keystone vignettes. Accompanied by a music piece by the same name composed by

Phillip Glass, the Pruitt Igoe sequence of Koyaanisqatsi begins panning through the

corridors of the financial quarters of New York City. It abruptly cuts to the burnt-out

brick buildings of an older industrial city, with rubble and decay everywhereexactly the

kind of neighborhood that Pruitt-Igoe was designed to replace. Residents of the slum sit

idly on the street corner, and children play in oily puddle amongst trash heaps. All at

once, the view is of a newer slum: Pruitt-Igoe after all its residents had been evacuated.

Streetlights hang from their mountings. Windows are shattered. A playground lies unused.
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As the music turns more dramatic, the camera begins flying amongst the Pruitt-

Igoe complex, which often fills the picture from edge to edge. It is a heady and quite

beautiful image. Rows of massive towers, perfectly square to each other, sit placidly and

perfectly on lawns and pavement. As the camera gets closer to the towers, it becomes

apparent that they are empty hulksdenatured faades of modernity. The hollowed-out

windows of one tower allow a view clear through to the tower behind it. A many-pronged

evisceration has taken place here: an evisceration of buildings, of social units, of urban

hopes, and of thwarted ideologies. The music climaxes as the buildings are detonated

from beneath, hobble momentarily, jellify, and then disappear into smoke.23

Koyaanisqatsi is a film which problematizes the nature of technological progress;

as such, the Pruitt-Igoe scene can be understood according to the Jencks conception, an

iconic moment where Modernist rationality and scientific progress failed spectacularly.

And yet, in the fleeting seconds before the destructive moment which vaporizes Pruitt-

Igoe, it is possible to isolate a sense of deep reverence, of proud nostalgia, and of genuine

beauty. For there is something noble, and also something heartbreaking, about Pruitt-

Igoe. It was the result of a great deal of humanistic and enlightened goodwill. One wants

to believe that the utopian drawings shown in the housing authoritys annual reports are

tenable. But those drawings are fabrications; the films of the decrepit project are real.

Thus the ruin-as-failure and the ruin-as-unrealized-possibility proceed forward in

dialectical lockstep, forcing a negotiation of values between the upward-lifting and

downward-dragging elements of human nature itself.

Indeed, much of the debate over Pruitt-Igoe is a proxy debate over the nature and

condition of cities, both in their immediate physical conditions and in the ways we

apprehend and comprehend them as inhabitants and practitioners. When Jencks enlisted

the destruction of the towers as a weapon, he did so under the banner of the informatics

and epistemes native to late-twentieth century virtuality and interconnectedness. With

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the triumph of consumer society in the West and, for seventy years, bureaucratic State

capitalism in the East, our unfortunate Modern architect was left without much uplifting

social content to champion, he wrote, and, in doing so, revealed the essentially political

and positional aspect of this particular urban argument.24 On the inverse side, writers like

Bristol suggest that such arguments subtly aggrandize the structuring role of the designer

by attributing all of St. Louiss urban difficulties to the layout of a few towers. The

architectural design was but one, and probably the least important, of several factors in

the demise of the project, she notes. The Pruitt-Igoe myth therefore not only inflates the

power of the architect to effect social change, but it masks the extent to which the

profession is implicated, inextricably, in structures and practices that it is powerless to

change.25 The interpretation and meaning of Pruitt-Igoe does not exist as a fact on its

own; it has no value in and of itself. Rather, it is activated within a matrix of ideals

principally defined by how we remember and re-evaluate midcentury Modernism.

Simmel recognized the necessary past-ness of the ruin, calling it the site of life

from which life has departed. Indeed, there is something inherently inaccessible ruin,

something which is irredeemably occulted behind a temporal veil. At the same time, the

ruin is an interface where that past rejoins the actuality of its present observer. The

ruin, he said, creates the present form of a past life.26 This sense of temporality is

crucial to understand the ruin; like the off-modern gaze, the ruin acknowledges the

disharmony and the contrapuntal relationship between human, historical, and natural

temporalities.27 The story of Pruitt-Igoe, which begins as a historical account, transfers

at the point of ruination into a point where historical sentimentality, political polemic,

and the epistemologies of urbanity are bound and cross-indexed. It is a story of an

American ruin in fact and in memory, where questions about the legacy of Modernism

were and are carried out.

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References
1Georg Simmel, The Ruin, in George Simmel, 18581918, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (Columbus: Ohio State UP,
1959), 261
2 Ibid., 262.
3Svetlana Boym, Tatlin, or, Ruinophilia: The avant-garde and the off-modern, Cabinet 28 (Winter
2007/2008), 44.
4 Simmel, 265.
5 Boym, 44.
6 Max Weber, Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman and Ronald Spiers (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994).
7Alexander von Hoffman, Why They Built the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project, Harvard University Joint
Center for Housing Studies. http://www.soc.iastate.edu/sapp/PruittIgoe.html
8 Katharine G. Bristol, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth, JAE 44, no. 3 (May 1991): 164.
9 Four Vast Housing Projects for St. Louis, Architectural Record 120 (August 1956), 185.
10Housing Authority and Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority of St. Louis, St. Louis Reports,
1959.
11Housing Authority and Land Clearance for Redevelopment Authority of St. Louis, Progress 1963:
Annual Report (January 1964).
12Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, Harvard UP,
1994), 124.
13 Ibid., 127.
14 Mary C Comerio, Pruitt Igoe and Other Stories, JAE 34, no. 4 (Summer 1981), 2627.
15 Ibid., 27.
16 Lee Rainwater, Behind Ghetto Walls: Black Families in a Federal Slum (Chicago: Aldine, 1970), 13.
17 James Bailey, The Case History of a Failure, Architectural Forum 123 (December 1965), 2223.
18 Ibid., 911.
19 Ibid., 9.
20 St. Louis Housing and Clearance Authorities, The Year 65.
21 Bristol, 166.
22Charles Jencks, The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Post-Modernism (New Haven: Yale
UP, 2002), 9.
23Godfrey Reggio, dir., Koyaanisqatsi (New Cinema: 11 November 1983). The Pruitt-Igoe scene is Chapter
7 on the 2002 MGM DVD edition.
24 Jencks, 24.
25 Bristol, 169170.
26 Simmel, 265.
27 Boym, Tatlin, 57.