Review: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth by Chad Friedrichs, director

Abstract

Chad Friedrichs, director. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth . Unicorn Stencil Films, 2011, DVD, 83 mins., http://www.pruitt-igoe.com, $295 In collective memory, the former Pruitt-Igoe public housing development in St. Louis remains frozen in the instant of its implosion. A cloud of dust and debris spews from the base, walls dissolve into vertical cascades, and the roofline buckles into jagged peaks and valleys. Such is the agony in which three of the complex's thirty-three eleven-story buildings were photographed in 1972 during a series of highly publicized razings using the novel technique of dynamite. The most widely circulated demolition image—credited to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and apparently taken on 21 April by the photographer Michael J. Baldridge—in turn became symbolic dynamite. The image has a terrible beauty, typically unacknowledged, that makes it a distant cousin to the ancient ruins painted by romantic artists. Powered by an unseen and unfathomable source, the violence evokes a quasi-natural disaster. As the demolition shot was reprinted next to optimistic images taken at the project's opening a mere sixteen years earlier, the story of Pruitt-Igoe was compressed into a kind of cartoon. Against the backdrop of falling buildings, which today's bloggers might call “demolition porn,” Charles Jencks declared “the death of modern architecture.”1 Opponents of public housing hailed the image as an emblem of welfare state dysfunction, or the supposed incivility of the poor black inhabitants. But beyond the reified image and floating slogans, what really caused the failure? This innocent but complex question is the point of departure for the documentary film The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011) directed by Chad Freidrichs. Challenging the axiom that Pruitt-Igoe was a place doomed from within, the film's narrator says, “Little was said about the laws that built and maintained it, the economy that deserted it, the segregation that stripped away opportunity, the radically changing city in which it stood.” Using archival material and original interviews with former …