Pruitt-Igoe is demolished

A modernist housing estate of 33 high-rise blocks, only eighteen years old, begins to be dynamited. The critic Charles Jencks declares the moment the death of modern architecture.

The demolition became a symbol of the crisis of modernism and the starting point of postmodernism, even though the causes were social and economic.

After the Second World War, through the Housing Act of 1949, the US federal government invested in clearing slum areas in city centres and replacing them with public housing. In St. Louis a large area north of the centre was cleared, and the architect Minoru Yamasaki, who later designed the World Trade Center in New York, was commissioned with his colleagues to design a new estate. It was named after a Black fighter pilot from the Second World War and a local congressman. It was originally intended to be racially segregated, with one part for Black and one for white residents, but after court rulings in the mid-1950s it became formally integrated. In practice, the residents were almost exclusively Black.

The estate was completed in 1954–1956 with 33 eleven-storey slab blocks. To save money, the lifts stopped only at every third floor, where wide corridors were to act as streets in the air with room for play and socialising. At first the buildings were praised in architectural journals. But cost-cutting also meant that the materials were basic and the flats small. Rental income was to pay for maintenance, and as the city’s population fell and the middle class moved to the suburbs, the estate acquired ever poorer tenants. Lifts and lighting broke down, flats stood empty and crime increased. By the mid-1960s Pruitt-Igoe was already being described as a failure, and in 1972 the demolition of the blocks began.

In his 1977 book on postmodern architecture, Charles Jencks turned the demolition into an obituary for modernism, even giving the time of day with ironic precision. The images of a tower block collapsing became some of the best known in the history of architecture. In the same year that the demolition began, Oscar Newman published a book on defensible space that used the estate as an example of how design could encourage crime. Later researchers have emphasised other causes: racial discrimination, poverty, neglected maintenance and a city in economic crisis. In the Swedish debate on the Million Programme, Pruitt-Igoe was often cited as a warning, but in Sweden the answer was usually renovation, not demolition.