EVENT
Pruitt-Igoe
The 1956 St. Louis housing complex designed by Minoru Yamasaki and demolished between 1972 and 1976 —
Lefebvre's canonical case of a space perfect on the drawing board and uninhabitable in practice, and the founding illustration of the
spatial triad's analytical power.
Pruitt-Igoe was a complex of thirty-three eleven-story towers in St. Louis, designed by Minoru Yamasaki — who would later design the World Trade Center — and completed in 1956. Its
conceived space was, by the standards of architectural rationalism, excellent: clean lines, abundant light, open corridors, rational organization, an efficient solution to urban blight. Its
perceived space — the space of daily practice — was catastrophic. The open corridors became sites of violence. The elevators that stopped only on certain floors produced dead zones where assaults occurred. The vast lobbies intended as communal gathering spaces became territories controlled by gangs. Residents adapted not to the conceived space but against it. Its
lived space — the emotional, symbolic relationship
between residents and environment — was dominated by fear, shame, and the particular humiliation of inhabiting a space designed by people who did not know the residents and had never asked. The demolition, famously photographed, became