At 3:00 PM on Thursday, March 16, 1972, in front of news cameras gathered on the fifty-seven-acre site of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in the DeSoto-Carr neighborhood of St. Louis, Missouri, the city’s Housing Authority detonated explosives at the base of one of thirty-three eleven-story residential slab buildings. The building collapsed inward. The footage, broadcast that evening on the national network news, would later be cited by the British architectural critic Charles Jencks as the precise moment modern architecture died.
Pruitt-Igoe had been opened eighteen years earlier, on schedule, on budget, to nearly universal architectural acclaim. The Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William L. Igoe Apartments, named for a Black World War II fighter pilot and a former white U.S. congressman respectively, contained 2,870 apartments designed by the architect Minoru Yamasaki of the St. Louis firm Leinweber, Yamasaki & Hellmuth. The complex had been one of the largest public housing developments in the country. Architectural Forum had named it the Best High Apartment of the Year in 1951, before construction was complete. By the time of the demolition, the buildings were almost entirely vacant.
Within five years of the first demolition, an entire generation of American architects had stopped designing modernist housing slabs. Within ten years, the working language of American architecture had changed completely.
The Demolition
Minoru Yamasaki had won the Pruitt-Igoe commission in 1951 in his late thirties. By the time he watched the first slab come down on television in 1972, he was fifty-nine and internationally famous: that same year, his other major project, the twin towers of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan, was topped out and opened for occupancy. Yamasaki had designed both buildings inside the same modernist consensus. The reception was opposite. The towers were briefly the tallest buildings in the world; Pruitt-Igoe was the most famous failure in American urban planning. Yamasaki, born in Seattle to Japanese immigrants in 1912, would not discuss Pruitt-Igoe in his autobiography. He told an interviewer the year after the demolition: “It’s a project I wish I hadn’t done.”
The first demolition on March 16, 1972 was followed by a second on April 22 and a third on July 15. The British architectural critic Charles Jencks, in his 1977 book The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, fixed the death of modernism specifically at 3:32 PM on July 15, 1972, the moment one of those later buildings imploded. The date was symbolic, not literal: the demolition program continued through 1976. But Jencks’s pronouncement stuck. The Department of Housing and Urban Development continued to release demolition footage to news organizations through the 1970s. By the time the last slab came down, the image of the Pruitt-Igoe collapse had been broadcast more times than the image of any building in American history except, later, the World Trade Center.
The two buildings Yamasaki was most known for both came down on camera. The first by federal order. The second by terrorist attack twenty-nine years later.
The Promise
Pruitt-Igoe had been one of the most carefully theorized public housing projects in American history. The Housing Act of 1949, signed by President Truman, committed the federal government to financing 810,000 new public housing units nationwide as part of postwar slum clearance. St. Louis received funding to build 5,800 of those units. The city’s planners, working with the urban planner Harland Bartholomew, decided to concentrate nearly half of the allocation into a single massive complex on a cleared fifty-seven-acre site that had been the DeSoto-Carr neighborhood, an area of nineteenth-century brick tenements the city had declared a slum.
The architectural firm Leinweber, Yamasaki & Hellmuth was commissioned in 1951 to design the project. Yamasaki was the lead designer. His initial proposal was a mix of two-story row houses and widely spaced eleven-story towers, with playgrounds, gardens, and what he called a green river of grass between the buildings. The federal Housing and Home Finance Agency, working under cost-per-unit caps, required Yamasaki to redesign the project upward. The row houses were eliminated. The amenities were eliminated. The site was packed with thirty-three identical eleven-story slabs, fewer ground-floor amenities, no landscaping, and skip-stop elevators that opened only on every third floor to reduce mechanical costs. The design was a Yamasaki interpretation of Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation, the eighteen-story slab the Swiss-French modernist had built in Marseille in 1952.
The complex opened in stages between 1954 and 1956. Architectural Forum had already given it its Best High Apartment of the Year award. The first residents, mostly Black families moving from substandard tenements, called it a dream come true. The original racial segregation plan, Pruitt buildings for Black tenants and Igoe buildings for white, had been made illegal by the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education in May 1954, the year construction was completing. The complex integrated. White families, almost universally, left for the suburbs.
The Failure
What happened next was an architectural failure only in the most attenuated sense. It was a federal policy failure with architectural consequences. The 1949 Housing Act had funded construction. It had not funded maintenance. Pruitt-Igoe’s operating budget was supposed to come from tenant rents. The tenants, almost all very low-income Black families, could not pay rents sufficient to cover the maintenance of a 2,870-unit high-rise complex. By 1958, the elevators were already failing. By 1960, the heating was unreliable. By 1965, the gallery walkways Yamasaki had designed as common spaces had become, in the residents’ word, gauntlets, where assaults and muggings were common. By 1969, the St. Louis Housing Authority had stopped attempting to maintain the buildings in any serious way.
Occupancy peaked at ninety-one percent in 1957 and declined every year thereafter. By 1969 the surviving tenants had organized the largest rent strike in American public-housing history, lasting nine months, demanding that the federal government take responsibility for the buildings it had paid to construct and refused to pay to maintain. By December 1971, only ten of the thirty-three buildings remained occupied. Federal authorities had spent $57 million on construction and renovation by that point. The St. Louis Housing Authority asked the Department of Housing and Urban Development for permission to demolish two buildings and consolidate the remaining tenants. The permission was granted. Once the demolitions began, the decision to demolish the entire complex followed within months.
The architectural profession’s response to Pruitt-Igoe through the 1970s was to take responsibility for a failure most contemporary scholarship now considers attributable to federal disinvestment, white flight, racial policy, and St. Louis’s collapsing tax base. The University of California architectural historian Katharine Bristol’s 1991 paper “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” was the first major academic effort to debunk the architectural-failure interpretation. By 1991 it was too late. The architectural profession had spent two decades absorbing the lesson it thought Pruitt-Igoe had taught: that modernist high-rise public housing was a discredited form. The lesson stuck whether or not it was correct.
Learning from Las Vegas
What replaced modernist orthodoxy was a sustained intellectual revolt that had been gathering since the mid-1960s and broke into the mainstream in the years after Pruitt-Igoe. Robert Venturi’s 1966 book Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published by the Museum of Modern Art, had already opened the case against the Miesian glass-box consensus six years before the first demolition. Venturi’s 1972 book with his partner Denise Scott Brown and the architect Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, finished the case. The book argued that the Las Vegas Strip, which serious architects of the period uniformly considered visual pollution, was actually a sophisticated symbolic environment, and that the discipline’s refusal to learn from it was a failure of architectural intelligence. The book’s central distinction, between the “duck” (a building that is its own sign) and the “decorated shed” (a structurally simple building wearing its symbolism on the outside), gave the next generation of architects permission to design buildings that referred to history, ornament, kitsch, and popular culture.
The first major postmodern public space in the United States opened in 1978 on a derelict block in the Warehouse District of New Orleans. The Piazza d’Italia, designed by Charles Moore with the New Orleans firm Perez Architects, was commissioned by the city’s Italian-American community as a memorial and a public plaza. Moore designed a stainless-steel-and-neon parody of an Italian piazza, with concentric semicircular colonnades in five classical orders, a fountain in the shape of the Italian peninsula, and his own face carved into water-spitting medallions. The piazza was an architectural manifesto, sustained ornament without apology, classical references rendered in materials the classical world had never seen. It was widely covered in the architectural press. It was deteriorating within five years and was being called the first postmodern ruin by 1990.
The European parallel had opened in Paris a year earlier. The Centre Pompidou, won in a 1971 international competition by the unknown thirty-something architects Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers, opened January 31, 1977, with its structural skeleton, mechanical ducts, escalators, and elevators turned to the outside of the building and color-coded in primary hues. The Pompidou was high-tech rather than historicist, but it shared with Moore’s piazza the basic conviction that modernist propriety was over. Buildings could now wear their guts on the outside, their history on the outside, their ornament on the outside. The skin of the building was now allowed to do work.
The Postmodern Decade
The skyscraper followed the public square. On March 31, 1978, the front page of The New York Times announced that the American Telephone and Telegraph Company had commissioned Philip Johnson and his partner John Burgee to design its new corporate headquarters on Madison Avenue. Johnson was seventy-two. He had been the architect, alongside Mies van der Rohe, of the Seagram Building two decades earlier, the canonical Miesian glass-and-bronze tower of American postwar modernism. The AT&T Building, completed in 1984, was the opposite of the Seagram Building. It was clad in pink granite on a steel frame faked to look like masonry. The base was an eight-story arched colonnade modeled on Italian Renaissance arcades. The top was a broken pediment with a circular oculus that immediately drew the nickname Chippendale, after the eighteenth-century English furniture maker whose highboy chests had similar pediments. The building was a manifesto: that ornament was allowed again, that history was allowed again, that architecture was not required to be transparent about its structure.
The reaction divided the profession. Younger architects, who had been told their entire training that the rules Johnson and Mies had set down in 1958 were inviolable, sent Johnson congratulatory letters. Older architects denounced the building as a billboard. Time magazine put Johnson on its cover in January 1979 holding a model of the AT&T Building. Within four years Johnson had won the inaugural Pritzker Prize. Within ten years almost every major American corporate headquarters under construction was working in some idiom borrowed from the AT&T’s playbook: Michael Graves’s Portland Building in Oregon (1982), Helmut Jahn’s One Liberty Place in Philadelphia (1987), the Philip Johnson-influenced towers in Houston and Dallas and Atlanta. By 1990, postmodernism had become the dominant working language of American commercial architecture. By 2000, postmodernism was itself derided and replaced.
Yamasaki designed Pruitt-Igoe and he designed the World Trade Center. The federal government demolished the first on national television in 1972 because modernism’s solution to public housing had failed. Terrorists destroyed the second on global television in 2001 for reasons that had nothing to do with architecture but everything to do with the geopolitical order modernism’s century had built. Both buildings ended in collapse on camera. The buildings that replaced modernism after Pruitt-Igoe lasted as a dominant style for about twenty years and were themselves replaced. The buildings that will replace what replaced them are being designed now. Yamasaki died in 1986, fifteen years before the towers fell. He did not live to see either of his most famous buildings outlasted by what replaced them.