Pilot neighborhood planning
Introduction
Pruitt-Igoe was a large urban development project developed between 1954[1] and 1955 in the city of St. Louis "St. Louis (Missouri)"), Missouri, United States.[2].
Shortly after it was built, living conditions in Pruitt-Igoe began to decline; and in the 1960s, the area was in extreme poverty, with high crime rates and segregation, which caused the international media to react to the neighborhood's decline. The complex was designed by architect Minoru Yamasaki, also the author of the World Trade Center towers "World Trade Center (1973-2001)").
At three in the afternoon on March 16, 1972,[3] less than 20 years after its construction, the first of the 33 gigantic buildings was demolished by the federal government.[4] The remaining 32 were demolished in the following two years.
The dimensions of the Pruitt-Igoe failure, which became an emblematic icon, sparked an intense debate on public housing policy. The Pruitt-Igoe project was one of the first demolitions of modern architectural buildings and its destruction was described by landscape architect, theorist and architectural historian Charles Jencks as "the day modern architecture died." Footage of the demolition was included in the film Koyaanisqatsi, by Godfrey Reggio with music by Philip Glass, which comprised an eight-minute piece named after the project.
Background
During the 1940s and 1950s, the city of St. Louis ("St. Louis, Missouri"), restricted by its boundaries established in 1876, was "a crowded place"; in the classical sense, it looked and felt like a real big city... like something out of a Charles Dickens novel.[6] Its housing stock deteriorated during the interwar period and World War II. More than 85,000 families lived in century flats and a 1947 official study revealed that 33,000 homes still had communal bathrooms.[6] Middle-class residents, mostly white, were leaving the city and their former residences were occupied by low-income families. The black (to the north) and white (to the south) neighborhoods of the old part of the city segregated and expanded, threatening to engulf the city center.[7] To save downtown properties from imminent devaluation, St. Louis city officials initiated a redevelopment of the "center ring" around the central business district.[7] The decay there was so profound that gentrification of existing real estate was seen as little consideration. practice.[6].