MODERNISM AS A SCAPEGOAT
"Happily, it is possible to date the death of Modern Architecture to a precise moment in time. Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 pm"
Abstract
Segregation is one of the biggest problems of Humanity and I was always interested what the role of Architecture in it was. I used example of St. Luis’s public housing project called as Pruitt-Igoe. This project became notorious symbol of Architectural failure. As time passes more and more articles are being published trying to find answers what caused failure. Most of them blame architects and modernism. This text offers history outline of Afro-American people, who used to live there before 33 buildings were demolished with explosives in the mid-1970s. Their powerful story with a dramatic end will help us imagine what kind of role architecture played in their life. At the end we will see how positive role architecture had on those black people and how everyone used modern Architecture as a scapegoat, to hide the biggest problem of racial segregation.
St. Luis’s post war project of downtown renewal was one of the most ambitious in the nation. Like many other cities in the postwar era, St. Louis was experiencing a massive shift of its white middle-class population towards the suburbs as a result vacant spaces in the central city was taken by slams which were surrounding downtown business district. Slums were highly segregated and divided by skin color – blacks lived in the north from business district and white lived to the south. As the black slums were expanding fast city officials saw the threat of losing poverty values in downtown real estate.
In the same time United States Housing Act of 1949 was declared which meant slums clearance and urban redevelopment. Pruitt-Igoe was one of these public housing projects - now no more than a messy plot of trees with an electrical substation. In 1972 was decided to demolish the project, and final demolition took place in 1976.
Since the trial demolition of three of its buildings in 1972, Pruitt-Igoe has gotten an iconic significance by feature of its continuous use as a symbol within a series of debates in architecture. In these discussions there is virtual agreement that the project's death demonstrated an architectural failure. In 1977 Charles Jencks announced that the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe represented the death of modern architecture. He raised an interpretation of the project that has today gained common recognition. Anyone remotely familiar with the recent history of American architecture automatically associates Pruitt-Igoe with the failure of High Modernism, and inadequacy of efforts to provide livable environments for the poor. This version of the Pruitt-Igoe story is a mystification. At the core of the myth is the idea that architectural design was responsible for the death of project. Placing the responsibility for the failure of public housing on designers, the problem shifts attention from the institutional or structural sources of public housing problems, which itself are deeply rutted in racial segregation.
To expose the myth I am offering a brief history of Pruitt-Igoe from the perspective of its place within urban redevelopment and housing policy. This history engages the deeply rooted economic and political conditions that shaped the construction and management of Pruitt-Igoe. I then consider how the Pruitt-Igoe story came to be created and spread, both by the national press and by architects and architecture critics. I want to focus particular attention on one of the most important aspects of the story: the alleged connection between the project's failure and the racial segregation. I will disprove legitimation of the architecture profession as the most responsible aspect in creating or solving deeply embedded social problems. We will see the architecture not as a reason but as a result.
History Outline
In 1950 the St. Louis Housing Authority commissioned the firm of Leinweber, Yamasaki & Hellmuth to design Pruitt-Igoe. Located on the north side black ghetto it had 2700-unit to house 15,000 people. Despite the intense pressure for economical design, the architects devoted a great deal of attention to improving livability in the high-rise units. Architects intended to create "individual neighborhoods" within each building. Pruitt-Igoe was a fairly standard product of the postwar period of American social planning and urban renewal, designed in a High Modernist style and one of redevelopments across the country aimed at responding the emptying-out and immoderation of city centers. Using the urban redevelopment provisions of the 1949 Housing Act, St. Louis' Land authority planned to clear slums and to sell them at reduced cost to private developers. These redevelopment projects would do an effort to bring the middle class back to the central city with creating middle cost housing and commercial units. At the same time, the St. Louis Housing Authority would start constructing public housing. These projects were thought to provide large numbers of low-rent units to the poor in order to stop ghetto expansion, and also to accommodate households displaced by redevelopment and other slum clearance projects. Before the rising spirit of Modernism could reify itself in pavement and concrete, though, it had to legitimate itself as a possible ideal. Beginning in the 1940s, the United States experienced two crucial developments that laid the basis for urban rationalizing projects. First, the demographic oscillations caused by the end of the Second World War, the opening up of new suburban developments and highways, and African- American in-migration loaded most of the nation’s cities with major cases of urban falloff. As middle-class whites fled the inner city and the prewar housing stock fell into disorder and inhabitability, needy ghettoes began to appear and then grow. At first the slum problem had no racial boundaries, but as time wore on urban disease took on an increasingly racial dimension. Before long, the physical devastating of the city led to an even more important spiritual cataclysm: those who lived in cities no longer cared for them, and those who lived elsewhere feared and hated them…
The fear of the cities perfectly mirrored in negative the transformative promises of rational administration. Thus, when the city of St. Louis received money from the 1949 Housing Act to improve living conditions in their ruined downtown by building 5800 public housing units; they included the Modernist vocabulary of urban improvement almost without question. Joseph Darst, elected mayor in 1949, was a member of the "new breed of big-city mayors" who believed city centers needed immediate and massive public interventions. The spirit of this ideology is concentrated into the very name of the city’s urban renewal bureaucracy, the Land Clearance and Redevelopment Authority. The existing urban environment, which had grown naturally since the rise of industrialization around the Civil War, was completely awful, and, more importantly, so totally out of line with ideas about progressive rationality. Disordered communities had to be cleared and then redeveloped from scratch. The name indicates not only the physical clearing which was approved on a huge scale by urban authorities, but also the intense mental clearing which it enabled. With a mix of new money, new buildings new spirit, the city could perform a phoenix-like return.
The St. Louis Housing Authority decided to allocate 2700 of the public housing units from the federal grant package to site located at the center of the black ghetto on the city’s north side. An officer from the federal Public Housing Authority decided that the project would consist of 33 eleven-story buildings occupying a superblock sliced from the structure of the existing neighborhood. The entire redevelopment, named after the black fighter pilot Wendell Pruitt and Congressman William Igoe, was to be executed in the perfect Modernist mode: new, clean, and mass-produced housing blocks set within open space would liberate the poor from the cruel, crumbling life common to the slum neighborhoods.
Pruitt-Igoe was completed in 1954. However originally conceived as two segregated sections (Pruitt for blacks and Igoe for whites), a Supreme Court decision handed down that same year forced desegregation. Attempts at integration failed; however, Pruitt-Igoe was an exclusively black project virtually from beginning. All the first tenants were pleased with their new housing. Despite relatively cheap construction quality Architects could design units which represented much higher level than the units they had vacated or been forced to leave. Families came from very small houses; there were three rooms for twelve member of family. Sleeping conditions were horrible. People used to sleep even in a kitchen on the floor, on roll over bed. After they moved in the units having clean, bright, well-furnished space they called it –"Poor men’s penthouse."
By 1958 conditions had begun to deteriorate, project turned awful and desperate due to the hopelessness of the society inhabiting it. One of the first signals was a steadily declining occupancy rate. As occupancy fell the project became an icon of the physical and moral disease of the American metropolis. St. Louis' housing officials failed to anticipate changing postwar demographic trends that dramatically affected the inner city housing market and threatened the capability of public housing projects. This decline in occupancy directly impacted the St. Louis Housing Authority's ability to maintain the project. Under the 1949 Housing Act, local housing authorities were expected to fund their operations and maintenance out of rents collected from tenants. In a period of rising costs and declining occupancy, the Housing Authority was placed in a cost-income squeeze that impeded its ability to conduct basic repairs. In addition, average tenant income was declining, as for black men was extremely hard to find job. The project came increasingly to be inhabited by the poorest segment of the black population: primarily female heads of households dependent on public assistance. These demographic shifts and economic pressures resulted in chronic disregard of maintenance and mechanical breakdowns. In a project increasingly inhabited by the poorest and most demoralized segment of the population, the vandalism came also to be accompanied by increasing rates of violent crime. The ongoing problems of vandalism, violence, and fiscal instability motivated a number of efforts to recover Pruitt-Igoe. In 1965 the first of several federal grants arrived to provide physical renewal and the establishment of social programs to benefit the residents and to end further rent arrearages. The authorities, still, had not given up on Pruitt-Igoe quite yet. In the early sixties, a Joint Task Force between the Public Housing Administration and the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was set up to save "community planning for concerted services in public housing."
The 1965 annual report of the St. Louis housing authority claimed: "Pruitt-Igoe—the past becomes prelude," and laid out a program of immediate spatial and social reorganization. That included new lighting, community centers, landscaping, and picnic areas, all "tied to intensified social services." The page is splashed with pictures of a community hearing, a young girl on the street, an artist’s rendering of a new play area, and, finally, the ever-present image of a group of children playing in front of one of the giant housing units. The Modernist spirit was still trying to keep its symbolic structure clear, to repeat the confidence in a progressive world that would materialize given enough rational social planning. But it was locked in battle with a countervailing force. Therefore Pruitt-Igoe became an occupied ruin, balanced in stability between the Modernism and segregated, broken society. Despite effort occupancy rates continued to decline, crime rates went up, management and maintenance was continuously ignored. In 1969 Pruitt- Igoe tenants joined residents of two other St. Louis public housing projects in a massive nine-month rent strike. This made vacancy problem more desperate.]
Pruitt-Igoe’s destruction was carried to its endpoint by the city itself, when the housing authorities chose to blow up their own project rather than follow a fruitless rehabilitation. Finally all the remaining tenants were moved and on March 16, 1972 a demolition experiment leveled three buildings in the center of the project.
It was not long after Pruitt-Igoe was completed that its failure began. When Pruitt-Igoe was first planned and built, experts agreed that St. Louis badly needed more housing to refresh its economy. By 1960, however, so many middle-class whites had left the city that there was now a large spare of housing, creating a demand gap which led to "deterioration, devaluation, red-lining, speculation, and finally demolition" all throughout the city. The original scheme to house blacks in Pruitt and whites in Igoe was soon reversed by a desegregation order, and, instead of integrating, the whites simply left, leaving the entire complex as a ghetto. Economic forces that extended beyond Pruitt-Igoe’s boundaries and truly far outside St. Louis trapped the housing development at the center of an automatic cycle of failure. Before long, the complex became "the dumping ground for all the people nobody wanted in other projects around the city." Despite some last-minute rehabilitation plans, in a stunning act of negative power, the towers were failed less than two decades after they were built. Project became the material for an ideological battle rewarded over the function of public architecture. Therefore, over all its phases of ruination, Pruitt-Igoe has been a kind of document, first in bricks and plans, then in graffiti lines and trash masses, and finally in films and essays, of the different ways of imagining, executing, and then remembering Modernist ideal.
Mystification
Clearly there were a number of powerful social and economic factors at play in the rise and fall of Pruitt-Igoe. Yet for most architects the entire story can be summarized to a one explanation: the design was to blame.
Despite its doubtful authenticity or historical accuracy, the Pruitt-Igoe story had achieved the status of architectural dogma by the late 1970s. The idea that Pruitt-Igoe's failure resulted from the selfishness of modernist design found captive audience and became an illustration for many Postmodern and anti-Modern texts. Peter Blake, in Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture Hasn't Worked, reasoned the claim that Pruitt-Igoe followed "Ville- Radieuse" design ideas. As a result, he argued, there was "no way this depressing project could be made humanly habitable" and communities of high-rises are naturally hopeless. It also became a convenient symbol for Tom Wolfe to include in his attack on the importing of German-inspired 30’s architecture to the United States after World War II. In From Bauhaus to Our House Wolfe repeated generally accepted fiction that the project was an award winner, and then added a lie of his own, asserting that in 1971 a general meeting was held at which the residents called for blowing up the buildings.
The first demolition of 1972 brought Pruitt-Igoe first-time attention in the architectural and the national press. Architectural Forum, AIA Journal, Architecture Plus and The Architects Journal all published articles on the failure of the evidently innovative design features. Life, Time, The Washington Post, and The National Observer, among others, reported on the demolition experiment and pointed to the architecture as one of the contributing causes. No longer restricting their criticism to particular architectural features, such as the open galleries, the critics now began to relate the project's failure to flaws in the overall approach or design idea. The general theme that emerged was that the architects were unresponsive to the needs of the lower class population and were trying to use the design to force a middle class, white lifestyle on Pruitt-Igoe residents.
For example, an article in Architecture Plus claimed that the design was simply inappropriate for the social structures of the people who were going to live there. George Kassabaum, one of the project architects, was quoted saying:
"You had middle class whites like me designing for an entirely different group..."
The suggestion was that low-income urban blacks created a tenant group with special needs - They were not inspired with the middle class value of taking self-interest to keep of their environment, and they also brought with them certain negative behaviors. As the Washington Post said:
"Incompatibility between the high-rise structure and the large poor families who came to inhabit it, only a generation removed from the farm."
The first important appearance of Pruitt-Igoe in a critique of Modernism came in 1976 when Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter used the photograph of the demolition in their introduction to Collage City. This section of the book was devoted to a demonstration of the premise that the Modern movement's architectural and social revolution had failed. Instead of spreading the development of a new society,
"The city of modern architecture, both as psychological construct and as physical model, had been rendered tragically ridiculous... the city of Ludwig Hibersheimer and Le Corbusier, the city celebrated by CIAM and advertised by the Athens Charter, the former city of deliverance is everyday found increasingly inadequate."
Though Rowe and Koetter do not refer to Pruitt-Igoe specifically, the implication of the photograph's inclusion is clear. Pruitt-Igoe is used as an example of this "city of modern arch-itecture" whose revolution failed. It presents Pruitt-Igoe as a product of the ideas of Hibersheimer, Le Corbusier, and CIAM and implicates the inadequacy of their ideas in the demolition of the project. Only one year after the publication of Collage City, Charles Jencks further advanced this interpretation in The Language of Post Modern Architecture. In the introduction to his discussion of Postmodernism, Jencks asserted that the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe represents the death of modern architecture. Like Rowe and Koetter, he associated Pruitt-Igoe with the rationalist principles of CIAM, and particularly with the urban design principles of Le Corbusier.
According to Jencks, even though the project was designed with the intention of instilling good behavior in the tenants, it was incapable of accommodating their social needs:
"Pruitt-Igoe was constructed according to the most progressive ideas of CIAM.. .and it won an award from the American Institute of Architects when it was designed in 1951. It consisted of elegant slab blocks fourteen stores high, with rational "streets in the air"( which were safe from cars, but, as it turned out, not safe from crime);" sun, space and greenery", which Le Corbusier called the "three essential joys of urbanism"(instead of conventional streets, gardens and semi-private space, which he banished).It had a separation of pedestrian and vehicular traffic, the provision of play space, and local amenities such as laundries, crèches and gossip centers-all rational substitutes for traditional patterns"
In 1977, Jencks published the first edition of The New Paradigm in Architecture, one of the first texts of the postmodern architectural movement. It begins with a photograph of Pruitt-Igoe collapsing:
"Happily, it is possible to date the death of Modern Architecture to a precise moment in time. … Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite. … Without a doubt, the ruins should be kept, the remains should have a preservation order slapped on them, so that we keep a live memory of this failure in planning and architecture. Like the folly or the artificial ruin—constructed on the estate of an eighteenth-century English eccentric to provide him with instructive reminders of former vanities and glories—we should learn to value and protect our former disasters."
It was the beginning of Pruitt-Igoe’s translation into a mystified memory. In the years that followed, Pruitt-Igoe became the topic for every method of attack on the Le Corbusier tradition of Modernist urbanity at Jencks’s idea. The towers were not made stand in for only for a particular artistic style: postmodernists used the evocative ruin of Pruitt-Igoe to hit an entire worldview, to disgrace and defame the complex of rationalist norms which made projects like Pruitt-Igoe possible. As it bored deeper into the lexicon of architectural theory, the Pruitt-Igoe image lost connection with the project’s actual history; it yielded its materiality to become almost myth.
"With the triumph of consumer society in the West and, for seventy years, bureaucratic State capitalism in the East, our unfortunate Modern architect was left without much uplifting social content to champion,"
- Jencks wrote.
Doing so, revealed the basically political and positional side of this exact urban argument using the destruction of the towers as a weapon.On the other side, writers like Bristol suggest that such arguments slightly boost the role of the designer by attributing all of St. Louis’s urban difficulties to the design of a few towers. "The architectural design was but one, and probably the least important, of several factors in the demise of the project,” - she notes.
"The Pruitt-Igoe myth therefore not only inflates the power of the architect to effect social change, but it masks the extent to which the profession is implicated, inextricably, in structures and practices that it is powerless to change."
The interpretation and meaning of Pruitt-Igoe does not exist as a fact on its own; it has no value in and of itself. It is activated within a atmosphere of ideals mainly defined by how we remember and re-evaluate midcentury Modernism.This interpretation of the end of Pruitt-Igoe received strong support when it appeared in Oscar Newman's Defensible Space in the same year as the trial demolition. This powerful text of the then evolving discipline of environment and behavior argued that there was a direct relationship between physical environments and human behavior. According to Newman, the widespread vandalism and violence at Pruitt-Igoe resulted from the presence of extreme "indefensible" public space; Corridors were too long and not visible from the apartments. The residents did not feel that theses paces "belonged" to them and so made no effort to maintain or police them. The entryways, located in large, unprotected open plazas, did not allow tenants any control over who entered the buildings. Newman further argued that by designing public housing in such a way as to provide an appropriate amount of private, semiprivate, and publics pace, architects could reduce violence and vandalism in the environment.
In 1970 sociologist Lee Rainwater wrote Behind Ghetto Walls, based on the findings of a massive participant observer study conducted during the mid-1960s at Pruitt-Igoe. He argued that the violence and vandalism that occurred at the project were an understandable responsibility to poverty and racial discrimination. In his view architectural design was neither the cause nor the cure for these problems. Improved housing conditions and other efforts directed at changing the behavior of the poor were, in his opinion, useless if not accompanied by efforts to raise their income level. It was the way people lived in these spaces, that concerned Rainwater the most. Residents complained of fights, drug use, vandalism, and theft. Again and again they spoke of feeling unsafe and of continuous defense against their neighbors. The community had broken down and turned on itself. People had been "defamiliarized" from traditional residence patterns and relationship structures in a way that did not produce a critical rise of modernity but rather an extreme vacuum occupying modernity’s remainder.
"The elements which make a city socially habitable—neighborhood tribalism, ontologies of belonging, idiosyncratic microtextures of travel and behavior— had undergone a malign inversion in these vertical cities, becoming mutual suspicion and spatial negligence."
Conclusions
Beginning in the mid-1970s, Pruitt-Igoe began increasingly to be used as an illustration of the argument that the International Style was responsible for the failure of Pruitt-Igoe. The fictitious prize is essential to this dimension of the myth, because it paints Pruitt-Igoe as the iconic modernist monument.
There is no evidence to blame the architecture team, led by Minoru Yamasaki, in any aspect of the project. Quite the opposite: by every offer, the architects produced a design which combined the contemporary innovations of the design community with creative applications adapted to the site. The budget for the project was quite tight, and so the designers were forced to compromise on a number of issues—a reminder that every built structure, especially public ones, is a kind of screen of the various intellectual, political, economic, and design forces which animated it. Yamasaki tried to mitigate the financial reductions with new techniques for creating urban community. Skip-stop elevators combined with galleries were proposed to create a sense of neighborhood in the large, identical complex.
In carrying out this task, the architects did follow the formal conventions of modern architecture. Pruitt-Igoe was one of Leinweber, Yamasaki &Hellmuth's first major commissions, so for sure they wished to make an impression on their architectural peers. The glazed galleries combined with skip-stop elevators, the wide open spaces between the slabs, and the minimalist surface treatment surely reflected the usual interest in Modernism as explained by CIAM. However, the use of these formal agreements does not demonstrate that the architects had specific aims for social reform. In fact, in published statements Minoru Yamasaki expressed doubt that the high-rise form would have a beneficial effect on public housing residents. These statements appeared in a series of articles in the Journal of Housing in which Yamasaki engaged in a debate with the progressive housing reformer Catherine Bauer. Yamasaki defended high raise design, not on its architectural merits, but as the best possible response to what he perceived s the social imperative of slum clearance and the economic necessity for urban redevelopment. Given the high cost of urban land occupied by slum housing, he argued, it is most economically efficient to build at high densities. Yet despite its economic advantages, Yamasaki was skeptical of the value of the high-rise as a form for mass housing. He defended high-rise design as the only way to respond to external economic and policy conditions. He said:
"The low building with low density is unquestionably more satisfactory than multi-story living. ...If I had no economic or social limitations, I'd solve all my problems with one-story buildings."
In her defense of low-rise housing, Catherine Bauer suggested that the policy of clearing slums and then rehousing low-income populations in high-density central city projects is not necessarily the result of economic imperatives but a conscious choice on the part of policy-makers. High-density inner city projects are the result of making public housing secondary than urban redevelopment schemes: If business interests and city officials were willing to locate projects on the urban periphery then the high-density, high-rise projects would be unnecessary. Bauer criticized Yamasaki less for his architectural views than for his politics; he was too willing to give in to prevailing profit-motivated redevelopment and housing policy. In his statements in this debate, Yamasaki hardly fits the image of the radical social reformer shown by the Pruitt-Igoe myth. His firm did indeed adopt particular design features in order to conform to the latest trends and was insensitive to the potential effects of those features. The architects also incorrectly assumed that the galleries would help promote community interaction in what was bound to be a harsh environment. Yet before making any of these decisions, they had agreed to work within the framework of the large-scale, high-rise, high-density project mandated by urban redevelopment practices. Rather than social reformers destroying the public housing program with their megalomaniac designs, the architects were essentially passive in their acceptance of the dominant practices of their society.
By the beginning of the 1970s, the authorities decided that the city could no longer continue throwing more planning, more ideas, and, most importantly, more money at keeping Pruitt-Igoe out of destruction. The project had become a national shame and a hostage in the fight over federal public housing grants.
Modernism as a scapegoat
By continuing to promote architectural solutions to what are fundamentally problems of class and race, the story conceals the complete inadequacy of contemporary public housing policy. It has quite usefully shifted the blame from the sources of housing policy and placed it on the design professions. By furthering this misconception, the story disguises the causes of the failure of public housing, and also confirms the continued participation of the architecture profession in token and kind efforts to address the problem of racial segregation in America. Mystification of Pruitt-Igoe benefits everyone involved, except those to whom public housing programs are supposedly directed. One has only to look at the surreal publications produced by the city to follow the humanistic—and certainly artistic spirit under which they supposed this rationality. The annual reports of the St. Louis Housing Authority are beautifully rendered documents, full of photographs of families at play and work, colorful illustrations of utopian cities, and strong quotes set in Modernist sans-serif fonts. They are written memorials to the kind of ambitious liveliness which restored (and also instructed) the means of urban change at midcentury.
Presentation of the architect as the guilty character in the history of Pruitt-Igoe is secured by linking the project's failure to the faults of High Modernism. The claim that Pruitt-Igoe failed because it was based on a base of social reform resulted from the ideas of Le Corbusier and the CIAM. It not only assumes that physical design is central to the success or failure of public housing, but also that the design was applied to carry out the architects’ social program. This directly confuses an architects' passivity in the way much larger outline that has its roots not in radical social reform, but in the political will of post-World War II St. Louis and in practices of racial segregation. Pruitt-Igoe was shaped by the strategies of ghetto containment and inner city renewal-strategies that did not emanate from the architects, but rather from the society in which they practice. The Pruitt-Igoe myth therefore not only fills the power of the architect effect social change, but it masks the ex-tent to which the profession is involved, in structures and practices that it is powerless to change. Simultaneously with its function of promoting the power of the architect, the myth serves to disguise the actual purpose and implication of public housing by diverting the debate to the question of design.
The story of Pruitt-Igoe, which begins as a historical excuse, transfers at the point of mystification into a point where “historical sentimentality, political polemic, and the epistemologies of urbanity are bound and cross-indexed.” It is a story of an American failure in fact and in memory, where made-up arguments about the legacy of Modernism were and are carried out, to mask and hide deeper roots of racial segregation and detestation.
“The city left the land fallow, and today the site hosts a vast tangle of plants, a literal urban jungle where entropy finally exercises its untrammeled chaos” Prof. Svetlana Boym
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Oscar Newman - Defensible Space Lee Rainwater – “Behind Ghetto Walls; Black Families in a Federal Slum” Charles Jencks – “The Language of Post-Modern Architecture” Minoru Yamasaki – “High Buildings for Public Housing?” Journal of Housing Catherine Bauer – “Low Buildings? Catherine Bauer Questions Mr. Yamasaki's Arguments,” Journal of Housing Tom Wolfe - From Bauhaus to Our House The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011) - film by Chad Fredrichs Peter Blake – “Form Follows Fiasco: Why Modern Architecture Hasn't Worked” Katharine G. Bristol - “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth,” Svetlana Boym - “Tatlin, or, Ruinophilia: The avant-garde and the off-modern” Alexander von Hoffman - “Why They Built the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project,” Svetlana Boym – “Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia”