A new documentary film delves into the complicated history, life and demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis.
The Architect's Newspaper has this review.
"The Pruitt-Igoe apartments were a place, but they have a greater presence as an epithet. Dynamited by St Louis authorities on live television in 1972, and eventually leveled over next the next four years, the housing projects became a concrete argument against high-rise, high-density public housing, and against spending money on the undeserving poor. The demolition created a mushroom cloud of urban planning textbooks. With it, the nostrums of liberalism and the modernist structures that sheltered its hopes came tumbling down.
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: An Urban History, a new documentary by Chad Friedrichs tries to persuade those willing to listen that things didn't need to turn out that way. Former residents of the project recall their years in Pruitt-Igoe as some of the best of their lives. The real villains, we hear, were neglect, racism, and abandonment."
FULL STORY: Review> Designed, Despised, Demolished
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