project | landscapes of production by heather dunbar + xiaowei wang
industry forest
factories economy ambiguity
ecological assembly line
T he more one learns about Pruitt-Igoe, the more one is struck by the ambiguity of the site. Layers of scattered history have shaped representation of the site into an ideological tool itself; a representation that serves any one of multiple narratives. From the trajectory of social engineering through design, the death of modernism, the failure of the American city, and the continued, unsuccessful attempts to alleviate inequity in cities, the representation and perception of Pruitt-Igoe itself almost overtakes the physical and material realities of the actual site. This neglect of the physical landscape has left us with a strange and accidental opportunity. Where Pruitt- Igoe, the idea and the building complex, once stood is now a spontaneous forest, a place where vegetation obscures and absorbs history. When approaching the Pruitt-Igoe Now competition we were struck by this accidental forest and thought it needed to be preserved to serve as a memorial to Pruitt-Igoe’s history. What came to our attention with further research was the neglected state of Pruitt’s surrounding areas. Instead of being levelled, the demise of Pruitt-Igoe’s surrounding neighbourhoods took place over time, sometimes one house was left standing on a block where there had been twenty. The shock of Pruitt-Igoe’s demolition spread beyond its site.
As we worked on the competition, we felt strongly that our competition entry needed to connect with the larger discourse on shrinking cities, and how these places could be turned into economic generators without repeating the patterns of boom, bust and inequality that they had experienced before. We were far less interested in a pastoral reclamation of the land, instead we knew we could leverage St Louis’s history as an industrial powerhouse. Abandoned areas surrounding Pruitt-Igoe would serve as economic ecological assembly lines. We imagined nurseries and aquaculture at an industrial level. Abandoned land could be reactivated with the intention of serving the St Louis regional parks system through the growth and distribution of native flora and fauna. Economically stimulating Pruit-Igoe, not through shopping centres and condos but through productive ecological zones, meant embracing the larger relationships between ecology and economy present in Pruitt-Igoe’s history, while departing from the typical attempts for revival that only repeat the past. We proposed a radical response to match the history of Pruitt-Igoe.
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Heather Dunbar and Xiaowei R Wang
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