The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: Fid-Bau Portal

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

Bristol, Katharine G.

This paper it an effort to debunk the myths associated with the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe public housing project. In the seventeen years since its demise, this project has become a widely recognized symbol of architectural failure. Anyone remotely familiar with the recent history of American architecture knows to associate Pruitt-Igoe with the failure of High Modernism, and with the inadequacy of efforts to provide livable environments for the poor. It is this association of the project's demolition with the failure of modem architecture that constitutes the core of the Pruitt-Igoe myth. In place of the myth, this paper offers a brief history of Pruitt-Igoe that demonstrates how its construction and management were shaped by profoundly embedded economic and political conditions in postwar SL Louis. It then outlines how each successive retelling of the Pruitt-Igoe story in both the national and architectural press has added new distortions and misinterpretations of the original events. The paper concludes by offering an interpretation of the Pruitt-Igoe myth as mystification. By placing the responsibility for the failure of public housing on designers, the myth shifts attention from the institutional or structural sources of public housing problems.