The Pruitt Igoe

One example that comes to my mind when discussing on failed projects due to planning policy is the Pruitt Igoe Housing Project in St. Louis. Pruitt Igoe was an urban housing project in St Louis that was built in 1955 and consisted of 33 11-story apartment buildings on a 57-acre site. It was based around the principles of Le Corbusier and the buildings were set at 11 storeys so as to leave more ground space for activities in order to build a community rather than just a housing project. However this was not what happened, rather the vast expanses of empty landscape did not feel like anyone’s yard and so were not taken care of nor used as was intended. The decision to include skip-stop elevators which only stopped at the first, fourth and tenth floors in order to forced people to use stairs and mingle with their neighbours in the oversized corridors, ultimately led to dangerous situations with the residents in constant fear of mugging or worse. In his 1972 book, ‘Defensible Space: Crime Prevention Through Urban Design’, Oscar Newman, described public spaces in Pruitt-Igoe as anonymous no-man’s lands for which residents felt no sense of ownership or responsibility. This, he argued, explained the vandalism and crime that became the norm in galleries, stairwells, and elevators. In 1972, after only 17 years of existence, and more than $5 million spent on curing the problems at Pruitt-Igoe, the St. Louis Housing Authority, demolished three of the high-rise buildings. A year later, Pruitt-Igoe was considered unsalvageable and the remaining buildings were demolished. In this instance I think Pruitt Igoe personifies what David Leatherbarrow states in his paper entitled "Architecture's Unscripted Performance,” where “the significance that buildings possess is granted to them by you and me.”

The failure of Pruitt-Igoe could be attributed to the motives of the designer to have a community-friendly public space in the project based on the precedence of other modernist projects to house the growing population of St. Louis which peaked at 850,000 people in 1950. However, the lack of on-site studies and analysis on the specificity of the demographic in the region where people were actually moving away from the city and its underlying factor ultimately led to the downfall of the housing project. Theoretically, the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project may tick all boxes in providing a platform for community-centric housing development based on the building policies of that time but the lack of studies emphasized on the human factor and the growing trend of the city proved a crucial factor in the failure of Pruitt-Igoe. There are many other factors that may have led to the failure of Pruitt-Igoe and even more theories on why it failed. I have always been interested in Pruitt-Igoe ever since I watched the documentary of The Pruitt-Igoe’s Myth. Below is the official trailer of the documentary: