The Pruitt-Igeo myth

By: Krittika Mittal (A/2439/2012)

The Pruitt Igeo was a public housing project built in the city of St. Louis which
failed miserably. You could love it or hate it, yet you simply couldnt ignore it.
While watching the documentary, I realized that the residents who lived
there had really strong memories of the complex. It might not have left a
rosy impression, yet not all memories linked to that place were bad. A poor
mans penthouse, as one of the former resident refers to it. The
documentary highlights the fact that architecture isnt always the reason for
failure of a project. The architecture took the brunt of the failure of the
project for a long time, yet there were other social and political issues at play
too.
Minoru Yamasaki was appointed as the architect for the project. He laid out
Pruitt-Igoe according to the best principles of the modern movement: an
orderly plan in which cars and pedestrians were separated, ample open
space was provided between the blocks, and flats were oriented to catch
daylight and views. Yamasaki believed that rational architecture could make
people behave better. However, Pruitt-Igoe seemed to prove the opposite.
The buildings were originally separated into two groups, the Pruitt complex
and the Igoe complex; one would hold blacks and any other minorities, and
the other would hold whites. Racial Segregation, one of the factors that
attributed to the failure of Pruitt-Igeo, can be seen to have influenced the
design. Yamasakis firm proposed a mix of varying heights and densities of
buildings-low rise, high rise, and walk-ups, but that plan was nixed and all
buildings were set at eleven stories each in order to economize each
building's construction. Regardless, money had to be saved somehow, and
changing the size and shape of the buildings wasn't the only way. In order to
get more people into smaller building footprints, the units were way too
small and had inadequate kitchens and plumbing fixtures. The lifts used to
stop at every third floor instead of every subsequent floor.
The Pruitt- Igeo project was started with honorable intentions. It was
imagined to be the solution to a lot of problems. Yet, rarely does a thing turn
out the way we imagined it would. When surfing through articles on this
topic, I found an interesting point. An architect pointed out that if you dont
give people nice things, they wont take care of it. By using lifts that stopped
only on alternate floors, or by employing social reforms that didnt allow the
working man to live with his family, the residents felt alienated and that the
government did not care. It did not treat them as equals, it treated them as
someone inferior. In his 1972 book, Defensible Space: Crime Prevention
through Urban Design, Oscar Newman, a Washington University professor at

the time, believes that the residents of Pruitt- Igeo had a sense of
detachment with the public spaces in the complex, a primary reason for
them becoming major places for all sorts of crimes. Newman pointed out that
by raising residents 11 stories into the air, the design aspired to keep the
grounds free for communal activities. However, these landscaped spaces
hundreds of feet below the buildings didnt feel like anyones front yard, and
no one took care of them. With Pruitt-Igoe, 20 units were put on a floor,
people tended not to take care of their public areas (halls, courtyards, etc.)
The failure of Pruitt-Igoe was less of an architectural aesthetic failure and
more of a planning, policy, and psychology/sociology failure. However one
cannot say that architecture had no role to play.
Everything that we design has an influence on the people who have to work
within that design, day after day. Often when we are designing, we are too
caught up in our rules and visions to realize the purpose of the whole design.
The major problem is that we often refuse to see the implications of what we
design. When in college, we are designing for a bunch of non-existent
people. We might include parameters like energy conservation, the optimum
space required for an activity, the climatic and topographic conditions of the
place, maybe even the history of the place in order to find the big idea. Yet
we forget to even think about social issues like untouchability and caste
systems and how that influences design.
I think that one of the major ways in which we can overcome this lack of
understanding is by awareness and sensitivity. I would like to give a small
example with reference to this. Last semester, in theory of settlement, we
were supposed to study about architecture and its influence on society. I was
supposed to study on how an issue like womens safety could be addressed
by proper planning and designing. A space like the pathway from the
architecture block to planning block can become a potential dangerous zone
in evenings due to lack of proper lighting and the lack of building other than
offices and workplaces. The planner who has designed the space might have
designed it and had the trees planted with thinking that it makes a very nice
shaded walkway when commuting down the road. Indeed it is an extremely
pleasing experience to walk on it during the day, at evenings it is hell. After
completing that study, from now I would think a few times before designing
any sort of path or corners.

References :
http://whyarchitectsdrink.blogspot.in/2009/06/pruitt-igoe-and-failure-ofmodern.html
http://www.aia.org/practicing/AIAB092656
http://e-five.hubpages.com/hub/Architect-of-Disaster-Minoru-Yamasaki