Someone has posted a long segment from Godfrey Reggio's 1983 film Koyaanisqatsi that includes the famous aerial footage of the vacant housing project and the explosion-based demolition that took down the entire complex between 1972 and 1974.
The Pruitt-Igoe sequence begins at 2:49.
Thirty-three acres of the originally 57-acre Pruitt-Igoe site at the southeast corner of Cass and Jefferson avenues remain vacant to this day.
Monday, July 16, 2007
Pruitt-Igoe Demolition as Seen in "Koyaanisqatsi"
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I saw this segment for the first time as a 16 year old and didn't understand the significance ... just enjoyed the explosion in my usual pyro way.
A few years later, I was sitting in a guest lecture during my 1st year of architecture school, listening to a British architectural historian discuss Otto Wagner's Karl-Marx-Hof in great detail. At the end of the lecture, one of the 4th year students asked, "But isn't public housing a dismal failure?"
The lecturer nearly exploded. He laced his answer with a lot of "you Americans" kind of almost attacks, but what he said was basically this:
Architecture can't solve all problems. You can't put everyone who has a reason to have a chip on their shoulder in one building or one area together and expect success.
And indeed, Pruitt-Igoe remains the poster child for the failure of architecture as the sole medium for social reform.
Here is the site today, just empty space:
http://maps.google.com/maps?t=h&q=38.642289,-90.209431&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=1407+N+20th+St,+St.+Louis,+St+Louis,+Missouri+63106&ll=38.642266,-90.208&spn=0.006327,0.013894&z=17
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