The Pruitt–Igoe urban housing project, a 1950s effort to revitalize ‘urban blight’ in St. Louis, was a project doomed from the start—and the “one big failure” of Minoru Yamasaki’s distinguished architectural career.
FEE:
CAN SOCIETY BE designed? Can an expert engineer alleviate people’s pains and struggles with a good-enough central plan and blueprint?
Minoru Yamasaki thought so.
Yamasaki was one of America’s most well-respected architects in the 20th century and was a member of the school of thought that people’s human nature could be improved (whether those people needed or wanted improving) by a properly planned building surrounding them.
Yamasaki got to test his theory by designing the public housing complex that promised to be a template for all public housing going forward. The complex, St. Louis’ Pruitt-Igoe, was made possible by post-war New Deal housing and urban development programs. And like many New Deal initiatives, Pruitt-Igoe was guided by the idea that good intentions, centralized planning, and strong government power would progress society more than protecting people’s rights or personal choices.
Pruitt-Igoe and Yamasaki’s designs were sold as the solution to poverty, crime, and housing in America’s major cities, but within just a few years, the complex would show the dangerous consequences when government planners take away people’s liberties and homes. more
ten percent of the people cause 90 percent of the problems. The two do not intermix.
“Seattle was not a great place to be Japanese…”
Well, apparently neither was Tokyo, or they would have stayed there.
On Twitter:
“I have $87,000 in college loan debt. If the government doesn’t give me debt forgiveness, I’m moving to a foreign country…Alaska!”
I think she needs to get a refund.
Progress. A modern 4 letter word.
I was just commenting to someone this week about the failures of Pruitt-Igoe and Cabrini Green. Great read.
Public housing, internment camps, reservations? Too far a stretch?
“prog-ress” is a modern double four-letter word.
IOW, double trouble. Maybe even, quadruple trouble.
@MildredLucille: With CRT math, progress is a four-letter word.
Some top-down planning is probably necessary. But more than just basic services is anathema to freedom and individualism.
When all of a society is top-down, that is tyranny and Marxism/Socialism.
Yama-who? More like the most famous architect I never heard of. I’ve heard of Frank Lloyd Wright, and a few others.
I’ve even read about that great fictional architect Howard Roark (Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead).
Which, in reading the article about Mr Yamasaki and Pruitt-Igoe, sounds eerily similar to Howard Roark’s work on the Cortlandt housing project. An ideal project on paper, Cortlandt was soon mismanaged to death by “second-handers”, and incompetents. So Roark blew it up.
Too bad Mr Yamasaki didn’t have enough courage of his convictions to do the same to Pruitt-Igoe when it was under construction.
I have lived in the STL area since ’79 and have seen the Pruitt-Igoe complex and have witnessed its effects before its demise.
What the architect designed was HIS idea of a complex with HIS understanding of a family. What he didn’t take into consideration was the Democrats destroying the black family structure with the additional payments to families without fathers.
Thereby making it more economically advantageous to remove the father from the family.
Without them, young males become feral. And deadly..
And that has spread to the rest of America.
And here we are today.
Great article. Sadly, politicians have learned absolutely nothing from this in all the decades since.
^ Right. Like government-managed ‘urban renewal’ doesn’t work.
New Deal housing and urban development programs made many manufacturers, construction companies, Unions, organized criminals and politicians VERY wealthy.
Thanks to the American taxpayers (we are still paying).
No level of ingenious city planning nor architecture can dissuade the legions of low IQ black assholes infesting every large city to not act like total shitbags. The best architecture for housing most of them has cell blocks in it.
The FHA has been destroying the suburbs as refuges from the fetid cities created by decades of Democrat administrations. It is not about race. Disadvantaged minorities who have found a way to better themselves have been fleeing Democrat cesspools as fast as whites. It is all about control. No one must be allowed to escape their poison.
Urban planners are utopianists. They only thrive within socialist environments. Their utopia requires total central control over every aspect of life. Their utopia is everyone else’s hell.
The WEF’s Great Reset is an urban planner’s wet dream. The Great Reset, Club of Rome, Agenda 21, New World Order, etc., are not conspiracy theories. They are conspiracies, said out loud and proud — and why not? They control most governments, education, finance, industry, information, entertainment, etc. We will serve them and be happy. They are convinced of it. If we don’t like it, they will make us pretend to be happy. They are convinced of it.
Was this the long game? Looks like it, and expertly played. There is no way to avoid becoming Venezuela, before the 2025 presidential inauguration. We will be making the same choices Chavez’s opposition has been making the past 20 years — to just stay alive and hope someone else will save us.
Save us, Mitch!
(Just thought I would end with a little positivity.)