Since its demolition in 1972, the St. Louis housing project known as Pruitt-Igoe has proliferated among critics of art and design as a symbol of modernism's demise. In 1977, the architectural historian Charles Jencks famously suggested that postmodernism emerged precisely at 3:32pm on 15 July 1972 when the first of Pruitt-Igoe's 33 buildings fell. More recently, however, historians like Katherine Bristol have sought to demystify what they call the "Pruitt-Igoe myth," which, they argue, reduces the failure of the housing project to a question of form and style. This article attempts to hold together the housing project's consciously modernist design with St. Louis's rapidly changing urban environment and larger shifts within the global political economy.
Pruitt-Igoe's failure lies not simply in the incommensurability between its modernist design and St. Louis's post-WWII conditions, but in the class bias inherent to both. "At Pruitt-Igoe," writes Craig Johnson, "low cost and low services were the primary design considerations. Therefore any association with 'modernism' was ideological, because modernism, deployed neutrally, really meant 'bourgeois modernism'" (35). And yet, Pruitt-Igoe persists as a symbol routinely used by critics like Jencks to discount the large scale projects of modernism in favour of a more "inclusive" postmodern architecture. In fact, the postmodern shift in architectural design, articulated by Jencks, corresponds to a different kind of pluralism in the socio-economic realm, which became increasingly resistant to public housing projects while relaxing regulation for American corporations at home and abroad.
