{"title":"‘Excavating’ Pruitt-Igoe using space syntax","authors":"M. Major","doi":"10.1017/S1359135521000130","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Pruitt-Igoe, in St Louis, Missouri, United States, was one of the most notorious social housing projects of the twentieth century. Charles Jencks argued opening his book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, ‘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 grâce by dynamite.’ However, the magazine Architectural Forum had heralded the project as ‘the best high apartment’ of the year in 1951. Indeed, one of its first residents in 1957 described Pruitt-Igoe as ‘like an oasis in a desert, all of this newness’. But a later resident derided the housing project as ‘Hell on Earth’ in 1967. Only eighteen years after opening, the St Louis Public Housing Authority (PHA) began demolishing Pruitt-Igoe in 1972 [1]. It remains commonly cited for the failures of modernist design and planning.","PeriodicalId":43799,"journal":{"name":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","volume":"45 1","pages":"55 - 68"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2000,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"arq-Architectural Research Quarterly","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1359135521000130","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"艺术学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"ARCHITECTURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
Pruitt-Igoe, in St Louis, Missouri, United States, was one of the most notorious social housing projects of the twentieth century. Charles Jencks argued opening his book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, ‘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 grâce by dynamite.’ However, the magazine Architectural Forum had heralded the project as ‘the best high apartment’ of the year in 1951. Indeed, one of its first residents in 1957 described Pruitt-Igoe as ‘like an oasis in a desert, all of this newness’. But a later resident derided the housing project as ‘Hell on Earth’ in 1967. Only eighteen years after opening, the St Louis Public Housing Authority (PHA) began demolishing Pruitt-Igoe in 1972 [1]. It remains commonly cited for the failures of modernist design and planning.
期刊介绍:
Arq publishes cutting-edge work covering all aspects of architectural endeavour. Contents include building design, urbanism, history, theory, environmental design, construction, materials, information technology, and practice. Other features include interviews, occasional reports, lively letters pages, book reviews and an end feature, Insight. Reviews of significant buildings are published at length and in a detail matched today by few other architectural journals. Elegantly designed, inspirational and often provocative, arq is essential reading for practitioners in industry and consultancy as well as for academic researchers.