The Pruitt-Igoe Myth

Pruitt-Igoe was a public housing project in St. Louis, thirty three buildings holding close to twelve thousand people. It opened in the fifties as the answer to the city's slums, was brought down with explosives in the seventies, and the image of that collapse went into circulation as the symbol of the failure of modernist architecture and of public housing itself. Chad Freidrichs's documentary argues directly against the symbol. It looks at the legislation that required the buildings to be maintained out of rent income alone, at the emptying of the postwar city, at segregation, and at the urban renewal programme. People who lived there speak, and what they describe does not match the symbol. It won the American Historical Association's award for interpreting history on film.