And yet another live memory, or inadvertent result, of Pruitt- Igoe is Ferguson, Missouri, and the event which gained international attention in the summer of 2014: unarmed black teenager Michael Brown was shot to death by police officer Darren Wilson. Upon the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe towers from 1972-1977, former residents of the project fled north to suburbs of St. Louis County including Spanish Lake and Ferguson, as closer white suburbs blocked the construction of multi-family housing. 5 Though architectural history would reduce the memory of the Pruitt-Igoe site to one iconic photograph of a tower being brought down by sticks of dynamite embedded in its foundation, the “live memory of this failure in planning and architecture,” in Jencks’ own words, is quite well. And those living it are subject to the same cycles of poverty and violence to which the towers bore witness. If the deliberate interventions and events that transpired on the site of Pruitt-Igoe in the past would have consequences far beyond the perimeter of the lot on which the buildings were located and far beyond the lifespan of the buildings, it is tempting to imagine what shape its future might take—and indeed, how in turn that might shape the future of St. Louis. The site of the former Pruitt-Igoe housing complex is located a mere two miles northwest of Saarinen’s Gateway Arch, bounded by Cass Avenue, North 20th Street, Carr Avenue, and North Jefferson Avenue. Private developer Paul McKee is currently proposing what he terms his Northside Regeneration Plan for the site, which would place the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency—the eyes and ears of the United States Department of Defense—squarely at the centre of what was once the Pruitt-Igoe housing complex. 1,500 acres of
residential, commercial, and office spaces, a school, and 50 acres of parks and trails complete the proposal. While this is not the first proposal for the site – previous proposals have included a golf course, a shopping mall, and for a time, a flirtation with industrial storage – it is a serious one. Mayor Francis Slay is pushing steadily for its inclusion on this site, and architectural studios at Washington University have already explored this notion. While the site awaits its future, it looks largely the same as it did in the summer of 2011, when I formed a non-profit organisation with Michael R. Allen, director of the St. Louis- based Preservation Research Office. Together, we launched the Pruitt-Igoe Now ideas competition: if prompted, how would contemporary architects, designers, urban designers, writers, artists and university students visualise the future life of the former Pruitt-Igoe site? Out of 348 total submissions collected between June 2011 and March 16, 2012, seven jurors—Teddy Cruz (University of California San Diego), Sergio Palleroni (Portland State University, BASIC Initiative), Theaster Gates Jr. (University of Chicago and Founder, Rebuild Foundation), Diana Lind (Next American City), Bob Hansman (Washington University), Joseph Heathcott (New School), and Sarah Kanouse (University of Iowa) — selected 31 finalists and three winning entries: first place, St. Louis Ecological Assembly Line: Pruitt-Igoe as Productive Landscape , Heather Dunbar and Xiaowei R. Wang; second place, Recipe Landscape , Aroussiak Gabrielian and Alison Hirsch; and third place, The Fantastic Pruitt-Igoe! , by Social Agency Lab.
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M H: A common thread in this issue of On Site review is: what do we do with empty space? what do we do with places ‘after the fact’ of what they’ve been – derelict cities, abandoned mines? What is the value of empty space and how do we experience it, and how are current policies and political narratives to rewrite the wilderness limited? An uninhabited (or informally inhabited) land is full of potential and can be read in many ways: moving forward means choosing one narrative over others. When dealing with a site with a complex social and
cultural history (i.e. all sites?) how do you choose to move forward responsibly, shaping what is to come? taking action - especially action on the scale of architecture - seems fraught with responsibility. S W: This is a classic piece of investigative writing: Nora takes iconic moments in American architectural history (she did a project on Philip Johnson’s Glass House in 31:mapping) and interrogates them with considerable ruthlessness. It makes me question all I ever learnt about architectural history,
simply because these simple narratives were written almost like one-liners that were so powerful that hardly anyone thought to look behind them. That she explains the link between Pruitt-Igoe and Ferguson makes more sense out of what to many of us was a senseless act: it has a spatial history.
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