In 1956, a large 57 acre urban renewal project was completed in St. Louis. It consisted of 33 apartment buildings, each 11 storeys tall. The entire complex was known as Pruitt-Igoe.
Early residents seemed to really like the buildings. The first tenant, Frankie Mae Raglin, called it the “nicest place she’d ever had.”
But 16 years later in 1972, the first 3 buildings within Pruitt-Igoe were demolished. And in 1977, architectural historian Charles Jencks proclaimed that the day Pruitt-Igoe was demolished was the day that modern architecture had officially died.
The modernist dream had failed. Architecture had failed us. Segregated “towers in a park” was not the way to socially engineer away poverty and slums from our cities.
This is the narrative that we have told ourselves, not only in St. Louis, but in cities all around the world.
But was it really all architecture’s fault?
Stuyvesant Town in New York (80 acres) shares many of the same architectural ideals that Pruitt-Igoe embodied and it seems to be holding up just fine. The same could be said for Lafayette Park in Detroit (46 acres), which is probably more telling given what the city witnessed in the years following 1956 – the year Lafayette Park was completed.
So the reality is far more complex.
Between 1950 and 1970, St. Louis lost about 30% of its population. Coming on the end, Pruitt-Igoe had a vacancy rate of 88%. Racial tensions were also surging. Here’s how the American Institute of Architects put it back in 2012:
Pruitt-Igoe was built during a tumultuous time in U.S. race relations in a city with an intense history of racial segregation. Pruitt and Igoe were designed as separate, racially segregated projects: Pruitt for African-American residents, Igoe for whites. As the towers were going up, the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision banned segregation. Faced with the possibility of living next to African-American neighbors in an integrated Pruitt-Igoe, white residents moved out en masse, exacerbating Pruitt-Igoe’s vacancy problems.
So while most cities rightfully would’t dare build in the spirit of Pruitt-Igoe today, this was not a strictly architectural problem. There is always an underlying social, political, and economic environment. And unfortunately architecture, alone, cannot solve everything.
If you’re interested in this topic, I recommend you check out a paper by Katharine G. Bristol called, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth.
Image by Bettmann/Corbis via The Guardian
We tend to think of buildings as being very permanent structures. After all, our cities are filled with buildings that are hundreds of years old. And in some cases, much older.
But the reality is that buildings, just like everything else, depreciate over time. They have life cycles and they need to be regularly maintained and periodically renovated in order for them to survive.
This morning I was reading the blog of Witold Rybczynski, who is an author and architecture professor at the University of Pennsylvania. A few months ago he wrote a post talking about the short life cycle of modernist buildings.
According to a recent colloquium at the Getty Center, the average life span of a conventionally built building (masonry and wood) is about 120 years. But for modernist buildings (reinforced concrete and glass curtain wall) it’s half that: 60 years.
And if you are to consider the typical big box retail store, the life expectancy is probably a third of that – if even that. Usually it is cheaper to just tear down the old box and build a new one when needs change. That’s part of the reason why the leases usually have clauses that try and prevent the retailer from just “going dark” and stopping operation.
So we are literally not building them like we used to. And there’s a lot of debate in architecture and building circles about whether or not this poses a serious problem for cities. It is clear that Witold is unhappy about this shift.
I am a strong believer in heritage preservation. I believe wholeheartedly that cities are far richer with layers upon layers of history. But I also acknowledge that in our world of 6 second Vine videos, we seem to be less worried about whether something will last 60 or 120 years.
Perhaps that’s a problem. Or perhaps the times are just changing.