Completed in 1955 in St. Louis, Missouri amid international fanfare,
the massive Pruitt-Igoe complex included thirty-three buildings of eleven
stories each. However, the complex quickly devolved to the point that city
officials chose to dynamite it from 1972 to 1976 because they deemed the
complex to be uninhabitable. Why were these buildings regarded so
highly, and then less than twenty years later so hated that they were
ignominiously torn down? There are many factors, not limited to:
architectural style; city, state, and federal policy; demographics; racial
division; and economics. Regardless of the specific factors, however, the
fate of the Pruitt-Igoe is not just the story of failed architecture or the
failure of urban renewal in one city, but is part of the larger context of
urban America and the crisis situation of the late Vietnam-War era