Pruitt Igoe Now
Transforming Perceptions: A Heterotopia in New North St. Louis
STEPHEN STRUTTMANN
3/16/2012
The fate of Pruitt-Igoe can be attributed to many social, economic, and architectural factors, but ultimately the project failed because it was designed for a utopian society that doesn’t exist. Inherently, these utopias are sites that have no real place; they are sites that have a general relation with the real space of Society. After the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in the 1970’s, time continued to move forward for the City of St. Louis, but people's negative perception of the site remained. The city's negligence of the site over the years that followed gradually transformed this lingering perceptional-memory into fact, leaving Pruitt-Igoe to exist to this day as the troubled epicenter of an area now associated with escalated levels of crime and poverty. There have been relatively few attempts to develop the site over the years, but each new proposal has faced the same opposition from former Pruitt-Igoe residents, forever linking the site with its long and charged history. This inability to completely reject its past has established the site as a placeless place in the mind of the city’s inhabitants.
In essence, the passage of time has allowed the Pruitt-Igoe site to evolve into a heterotopia; a place that Michel Foucault would describe as being a space between space, a place of indefinitely accumulating time, and a site capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several sites that are in themselves incompatible. While not completely falling into the chaotic pressures of a dystopia, the heterotopia is flexible, very transient in nature, and rests comfortably somewhere in-between the dystopia and the aforementioned utopia. Consequently, the successful re-development of the Pruitt-Igoe site will rely on embracing and manifesting this fact, as illustrated in the following design.
Transforming Perceptions: A Heterotopia in New North St. Louis
STEPHEN STRUTTMANN
3/16/2012
The fate of Pruitt-Igoe can be attributed to many social, economic, and architectural factors, but ultimately the project failed because it was designed for a utopian society that doesn’t exist. Inherently, these utopias are sites that have no real place; they are sites that have a general relation with the real space of Society. After the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in the 1970’s, time continued to move forward for the City of St. Louis, but people's negative perception of the site remained. The city's negligence of the site over the years that followed gradually transformed this lingering perceptional-memory into fact, leaving Pruitt-Igoe to exist to this day as the troubled epicenter of an area now associated with escalated levels of crime and poverty. There have been relatively few attempts to develop the site over the years, but each new proposal has faced the same opposition from former Pruitt-Igoe residents, forever linking the site with its long and charged history. This inability to completely reject its past has established the site as a placeless place in the mind of the city’s inhabitants.
In essence, the passage of time has allowed the Pruitt-Igoe site to evolve into a heterotopia; a place that Michel Foucault would describe as being a space between space, a place of indefinitely accumulating time, and a site capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several sites that are in themselves incompatible. While not completely falling into the chaotic pressures of a dystopia, the heterotopia is flexible, very transient in nature, and rests comfortably somewhere in-between the dystopia and the aforementioned utopia. Consequently, the successful re-development of the Pruitt-Igoe site will rely on embracing and manifesting this fact, as illustrated in the following design.