Many of the “innovations” that excited architects in the mid-1950s— such as the skip-stop elevators—were the root of the dissatisfaction of the late 1960s. Yamasaki’s original plan was to include long communal hallways that served the residents of several floors; as seen in Fig. 6, Yamasaki intended these corridors to serve as community gathering places, where families could relax in a manner similar to how they would on a front porch in a street-level neighborhood. However, these hallwaysquickly became unsafe, defaced, and isolated; one of their primary uses was to serve as havens for drug-dealers, and most residents stayed locked-up in their rooms and only ventured into the corridor when necessary. Eerily symbolic of the entire complex, (as seen in Fig. 7) the corridors quickly devolved from the idealized communal space Yamasaki envisioned to dangerous and isolated areas.24
A primary function of public housing is to provide a safe shelter— cheap and not luxurious but secure; therefore, the Pruitt-Igoe projects failed, due both to bad design and the destructive behavior of the tenants themselves. At the beginning, Pruitt-Igoe was supposed to provide a better environment than the “slums”—though the elites who thought this may have been incorrect—and also to keep the underclass in line by isolating them and meeting their basic needs. According to Oscar Newman in his 1972 book, Defensible Space, where people live affects their behavior. In the case of Pruitt-Igoe, he argued, the residents felt ignored so they vented their frustration on the environment where theylived. While this concept is debatable, it does help explain the failure of Pruitt-Igoe.