It’s almost a truism in the art and architectural world that the detonation of the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex in St. Louis was the moment that Modernism ended. The movie poster. It was a theory first ...

In the 1950’s, the Pruitt-Igoe housing project represented a new chapter in city life. The massive collection of buildings promised comfortable homes to lower class residents, but the its ideal ...

The 1972 demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe building in St. Louis (Photo by U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Office of Policy Development and Research) This is your first of three free ...

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011), a documentary film directed by Chad Freidrichs, explores the history of the St. Louis, Missouri housing project that became best known for its demolition in the early ...

In only a few decades following the Second World War, American public housing projects from Chicago to Atlanta went into steep decline. Concieved and built largely between the ‘30s and the ‘50s, such ...

Back in the 1950s, St. Louis commissioned a public housing project unlike any in history. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki — the architect who would later design the World Trade Center — the Pruitt-Igoe ...

Detailing the birth, life and death of America’s first major urban housing project in St. Louis, Chad Freidrichs’ “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” combines concise but thoroughgoing sociological-historical ...

From its fanfare opening in 1954 to its live-on-TV demolition three decades later, the St Louis public housing project remains a powerful symbol of the social, racial and architectural tensions that ...

The first Pruitt-Igoe building to be demolished was imploded in 1972. Click on the slide show button to view additional images. Accepted wisdom will have us believe St. Louis' infamous Pruitt-Igoe ...