On March 16, 1972, a massive explosion shook the city of St. Louis. At 3 p.m., the first building dropped to the ground. The afternoon. In the months that followed, more than 30 buildings were reduced into rubble.
The demolished buildings were part of the now notorious housing project known as Pruitt-Igoe. It was claimed to be a revolution in urban planning when the Pruitt-Igoe housing project opened in 1954. Pruitt-Igoe, stretching 57 acres around the northern side of St. Louis, consisted of 33 high-rise buildings and supported the local area with almost 3,000 new homes.
Pruitt-Igoe was built out of contemporary architecture with cutting-edge concepts. The designers stressed green spaces and crammed residents with stunning views of the surrounding city into high-rise buildings. Skip-stop elevators were used in the towers, only stopping on the first, fourth, seventh, and tenth floors. The buildings were designed with "unbreakable" lights that were covered in metal mesh and intended to minimize vandalism (Architects claimed that requiring people to use the stairs would minimize foot traffic and congestion in the building). To brighten the corridors with natural light, the floors featured communal garbage chutes and wide windows.
On paper, a testament to human technology was Pruitt-Igoe. The project was, in fact, a failure.
The Failure of Pruitt-Igoe
When the neighborhood troublemakers learned that the light fixtures were supposedly unbreakable, they accepted the challenge and poured water on the lights until they burned out and overheated.
Next, the garbage chutes were destroyed and the windows smashed. The bright new corridors had so many broken windows, according to one article, that "it was possible to see straight through to the other side."
It was intended by the St. Louis Housing Authority to use rental income to pay for building repairs. The population of St. Louis began to drop in the years after the massive project opened, as individuals moved out of the area. The buildings were left unfixed, with fewer tenants than planned and growing rates of vandalism.
Soon, Pruitt-Igoe's new design started to accelerate its downfall. The skip-stop elevators immediately became a challenge to well-behaved people who were forced to walk through extra corridors and dangerous stairways just to get in and out of their apartments. When criminal activity grew, more activities were disrupted, more people moved on, and less money came in.
The St. Louis Housing Authority scheduled a demolition in 1972, less than 20 years after the project had opened, and blew up the whole $36 million complex.
Undervalued are old concepts
Pruitt-Igoe 's expansive 33-building, 57-acre layout overlooked the conventional knowledge of how communities develop and grow. Almost every prosperous and profitable city on our planet has been organically and unpredictably constructed. As needed, buildings popped up. Gradually, city blocks grew.
We appear to undervalue old concepts for one reason:
We only see an idea at first sight that has been around for a long time. We wrongly conclude that average outcomes are generated by familiar ideas. Everyone is doing it like this, so it can't be that amazing ... right? What we fail to realize is that it is not just a set of good ideas that are the fundamentals.
The basics are a compilation of positive ideas that have outlasted thousands of bad ideas.
