Are modernist public housing projects the reason we have strip malls and mcmansions?

Partly. They couldn't solve the problems of the city like they promised to solve them. And they certainly weren't cheap either. And principally the same reason they weren't cheap is the same reason we don't have workhouses today as they weren't cheap either.

But, we do have a relic in our own language that's reminiscent of that previous architectural experiments. Ever hear the phrase "wind up in the poorhouse?"

Because if you become poor, homeless or a debtor... they sent you to one of these, dressed you up in striped pajamas and forced you to work 12 hours while charging you market-rate rent. You could eventually leave after you were cured of your "pauperism."

The workhouse from Oliver Twist.

And another.

The only difference between these and Pruitt-Igoe is about 8 stories and the fact that Pruitt-Igoe didn't come with a guaranteed "job."

So you can only imagine that the people who were to live in Pruitt-Igoe either themselves, or their parents or their grandparents who were either slaves or had lived in one of these at some point. And the fact that images of these institutions were still floating around in books, in movies and even in art were particularly popular and relevant at the time.

This archtype certainly wasn't new and the only thing modernists did was put a parking lot on it and call it the savior of humanity.

Also considering Yamasaki was a Japanese-American at the time living in America during WWII and the government wanted to put him and people like him in "housing projects."

Why would someone spend 5-10 years of their life hiding from this kind of practice only to get paid to do it to someone else?

At least those Japanese-Americans had access to fresh air and sunlight!

so - is it my fault the developer on the high-rise modernist apartment building I worked on back in 2007-2008 had trouble meeting 50% occupancy when the market crashed?  i knew we should have gone rococo - or maybe it was the corridors... or the fact that we only used our time machine to go back in time.

There are more well used successful modern housing projects everywhere on earth. Yes, well used and occupied. More than the failed ones.  Local conditions, culture, economics, time, society in general, change.

Because PI was dynamited, does not mean it was for its architecture. It has symbolized larger political battle of type of government people advocate, support or want. It was a large political bang that architecture was a perfect prop. That part is very clear. It is a bigger issue.

http://www.pruitt-igoe.com/

This thread could not necessarily be about architecture of certain era. The demo 'event' does not indicate any 'end of history.' Political thoughts, for or against it, still exist and contested, IT (s) and similar applications and variations are still built everywhere. End of modernism is a mute argument and it does not really produce anything as it can't pinpoint its starting point either. I mean, if you can trace and find the first use of Cartesian grid streets in Miletus, is that a start? Is Corbu's habitat building failiure? Wouldn't you want to live there? Which master plan project is your classmate working on in China?

Let's say this; imagine there was a major and increasingly successful university or a large factory or such, opened next to it, do you think the project would come to same  ending? Imagine some of the buildings were re purposed after a thoughtful and reasonably funded plan, do you think it would meet the same end? To think it was the corridor width etc., is skirting the real lack of imagination and not understanding the idea that buildings are not usually the cause of the problem. What if there was a constructive plan to rehab these buildings, re design the grounds, privatize some of it to the public co-ops, even selectively demolish a one or two blocks to open space between the buildings to install something more akin to community use.

If this picture below was all fixed faithfully to its original intent and was in color or in a sunny day, there would be a lot of 'thumbs ups' for it as Archinect's photo feature. And that would be even without the interior shots with Eames chairs etc.. 

If we know what lead to PI's demise as a building, we don't repeat it it is an easy fix. If we know unemployment is bad, we need to absorb it and improve it that is the big project. Dense urban housing is inevitable and sustainable. If 'they' dynamite any social condition and social programs because certain political interests wanted it to die and cease, than 'we' have a system that needs to be fixed before it becomes a civil war.

If an urban critic want a hold a mirror to a suspect for housing problems, it is not only the buildings or architectural systems in general but  quality of life they are occupied with and people who undertook its governance and maintenance.

JJ man you are a google maniac. 

just a touch of irony that the garden movement lead directly to modernist blocks just like this one, many of them successful.  the more i travel the world the clearer it is to me that style is irrelevant.  only people matter. there is some technical knowledge that architects can use to make good places, but there are limits.  why is that so disconcerting?

orhan summarised it all pretty well in my book.

the more i travel the world the clearer it is to me that style is irrelevant.  only people matter. there is some technical knowledge that architects can use to make good places, but there are limits.  why is that so disconcerting?

If we ignore the sociological, philosophical and cultural ramifications of design, 'style' can then be described as an instructional methodology in object creation.

Objects are medium onto which meaning— and therefore style— are applied to, on or in. That being said as a process of object creation, style has an economical tangible known as added value.

Therefore, any physical object can be broken down into the raw material that the object is made of and the value added processes behind it.

If we were to look at it as a mathematical formula, it might look something like this:

V = M + I + D

where M = (L1 * H1) + (P1 * Ph1) + (Inv*(H1/TT1+Ph1/TT2)) + O
where I = ((L2 * H2) / S1)
And D = ((L3 * H3)  / S1)

Basically value is the summation of materials, ingenuity and design: the cost of materials is dependent on the cost of labor, cost of processing it plus the cost of the investment the former two processes occupies and extraneous costs; ingenuity is the cost of paying someone engineer an object divided by the total objects created; and, design is the cost of paying someone to design the object divided by the total number of objects.

Here's an example: a standard clay pitcher where the clay is prebought, molded, fired, painted, fired, glazed, fired— a process that should take between 20 to 40 hours in total. This assumes we're doing a one-off batch of 25.

If we're talking a small batch, the materials cost is about $0.50, $15 to shape (1 hour work @ $15), ~$5.00 in capital cost (space, kiln lifecycle, ownership interest) and about $1.05 per pitcher.To determine the shape, size, decoration and other nuances, we've hired a product  designer that comes out to about $12 a pitcher. And say the object takes 12 hours of painting ($15 dollars an hour), that adds an astounding $180 to the price.

The total price is now $214. Our little decorative arts pitcher through design and decorating been value added by about $192. Add on transportation and retail markup, this single pitcher is probably in the $400 range.

If you remove value added from this equation, that clay pitcher becomes exceptionally cheap. And that's where style effects price.

If we pop on over to a decorative arts manufacturer... the stately Royal Copenhagen, we'll see that they are selling pitchers and teapots in the $250-$1000 range. Coincidentally, they have two modernist jugs— the hand-painted one sells for $150 while the plain white sells for $100.

Decoration pays people— modernism (read: minimalist), in its extreme, argues against the very thing that kept many people employed. And frankly many modernist (read: minimalist) objects are entirely over-priced.

But hold on. When someone pays for, say, minimalist style buildings or interiors, they are paying for the concept right? So the price shouldn't change as much.

Because it's intangibles that are being charged for. So Minimalist design and, I dunno, Baroque design should theoretically cost the same amount. It's the idea that's being paid for. So minimalist objects can't really be overpriced.

What I find peculiar about this dicussion is that people here (toaster/jump/orhan) are quick to defend P-I, but at the same time, abdicate the modernist ethos that created it (the many "architecture cannot change behaviour" posts). My take is the exact opposite. P-I was an abject failure of design (as were most of these post-war public housing projects), but it was not a failure of modernism, i.e. good design can still contribute to a better society. The former position strikes me as being incredibly nihilistic and I believe is responsible for fueling much of the empty formal design that is so prevelant in contemporary architecture today.

won - because of massive population shits and urban decline in the post war years coupled with other major policy and problems associated with management and funding of public housing in general and this project in particular, we have no clear idea if P&I (and several other modernist public housing projects) would have failed or succeeded  solely on the basis of its physical design.  there were far too many variables that led to its demise.  This is the point that I keep repeating ad nauseum.

we do know that there were some design flaws and bad assumptions (which we've learned from and have tried not to repeat on subsequent public housing projects), and that some aspects of this project DID ACTUALLY WORK (which people over the past several decades seem to conveniently ignore in order to push their particular political agenda) - but to say that P&I was an abject design failure is completely ignoring everything else that was going on during this time period.  I'm not defending the actual design of P&I, but this idea that somehow it was the physical design alone that caused all the problems at P&I and at other public housing projects is completely absurd, and what I'm assuming others are taking issue with.

unless you are claiming that the entire concept of public housing is faulty - then this is an entirely different debate - and I'm sure the positions of those of us who actually have experience with such projects would be even more nuanced and unsatisfying.

the physical design alone that caused all the problems at P&I and at other public housing projects is completely absurd

I agree, but the design was a key element.

I'm sure the positions of those of us who actually have experience with such projects would be even more nuanced and unsatisfying.

no need to be a dick; you have zero knowledge of what my experience is with these projects.

won -  are you prepared to embark on the level of research, studies, interviews, community meetings, etc... that would go into a successful civic project?  this stuff takes years - takes expertise well beyond our training - lots of compromise - political/legal wrangling - and often the result is not something that is built.  I'm not sure any private client would agree to this - and usually this is what city planning departments and other government agencies are supposed to do - but more often than not this tends to be initiated from engaged and organized communities and civic leaders (and we as design professionals should be included on this list).

And by the way, this is what I do for a living.

In Does Urban Public Housing Diminish the Social Capital and Labor Force Activity of Its Tenants? (2001), the authors find a correlation between public housing and neighborhood disadvantage but little effect on social capital and labor force activity.

What that really means is that the mechanical aspects of housing projects are not questionable— comparable to those outside of housing projects, residents of housing projects have similar level of social interconnectedness and employment rates to their peers.

However, public housing negatively effects the surrounding area. Neighborhood disadvantage, disorder, and health (2001) finds a correlation between neighborhood disadvantage and physical and mental health. By living in a state of constant fear, residents of disadvantaged neighborhoods exhibit various states of impaired health not only to immobilization but also due to stress within the home.

Housing projects, specifically those that look and act like housing projects, do in fact change people not just philosophically but also physiologically. And how does one identify a public housing project? By its visual cues of course. That means its design.

" the physical design alone that caused all the problems at P&I and at other public housing projects is completely absurd.

I agree, but the design was a key element."

Ok, then, if all the people here arguing that it was P-I's design that was a key element or the main reason for its failure, how the fuck do you explain places like this?

Look at it....I mean look at it.  It has all of the right elements, the ones that Jane Jacobs spoke of, the scale, the eyes on the street, the beautiful neighborhood church, I'm assuming a corner store at the other end of the block.  And look at the materials, limestone and brick, corbeled out cornices, arched windows, only three stories high....perfect.  So if design failed so miserably in P-I, then what happened here?  You can't have it both ways: if you claim design was a culprit there, then should not positive aspects of design stop decay and crime in something like this neighborhood?

In fact, I know many, many neighborhoods in Philadelphia just like this one, places I wouldn't want to walk through even in daylight, controlled by drug gangs and criminals, where people live in fear just like they did at P-I.  So why didn't the "correct" design of this neighborhood stop this?  If bad design causes bad behaviour as claimed, then shouldn't good design be an overwhelming force to stop it?

Not only that, for every design element you name that supposedly caused P-I to fail I can look up twenty cases where those very same elements or ideas worked out just fine, and still do.  Could it then be, as some people have pointed out above, that there are some other more powerful forces at work, too numerous to quote here, that caused the failure of the neighborhood above and of P-I, that are well beyond an architect's power to solve?

there's an interesting area in queens, ny where a major expressway cuts through a zone of high-rise residential development.  on one side, there's a huge project called Lefrak City, and on the other there are a couple of very similar multi-building, high-rise, mixed-use projects.  They all began in the 50s/60s as middle-class urban housing.  The Lefrak City side was the object of a housing discrimination lawsuit in the 1970s, which forced the owners to abandon racist rental policies, leading to massive white flight and a spike in crime.  the developments on the other side of the highway remained middle-class and sought-after through the 80s and 90s, and were very popular with russian and east-european immigrants (probably because they looked like home...) Not many black people lived there...surely not coincidentally.

It's an interesting window into the kinds of processes that shape "good" and "bad" environments...

an article from the 80s:

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/03/11/realestate/troubled-lefrak-city-turning-the-corner.html?pagewanted=2

i tried to post a photo--how do you do it from the hard drive, and not with a URL?

you have to upload it to a site and then link elinor.

gotta agree with emilio.  i grew up in first ring suburb 10 minutes walk from downtown.  it was an occasionally violent and generally dangerous place and looked like a new urbanist suburban dream.  there was not a huge lack of eyes on the street and i guess we were all skinnier cuz we walked more (ok ok i lie, that didn't happen, not even in the 70's). but apathy overcame any design benefits of the entire place.

not sure it actually matters but i have done a few social housing projects.  not as big as pruitt-igoe, just a few hundred units.  personally the ones that i liked best were 5 story walk-ups, arranged to create nice range of scale outdoor spaces and all that good stuff.  the towers in a park types that i worked on were not as nice and i imagine did not make the inhabitants all that comfortable. 

both projects were co-ordinated by the govt so we did not have much control over the design in the end.  probably the same as in the usa, the room-sizes were mandated as were window sizes balconies, materials, etc etc.  responsibility for the design is a kind of complicated thing to talk about really.

anyway, as far as it goes because this is japan we are talking about there has not been any need to dynamite either the towers or the walk ups.  i can definitely tell you which type is a better design, but taking the leap to building design causing social problems is pretty hard...

it seems like jencks understood all the above and he just wanted to tell a story. 

that so many have taken it on face value is interesting.  i am curious if there is anyone like jencks out there now who is narrating our lives as architects?   it feels like no one trusts the word anymore.  or is that just me?

ok, can you tell which is which?

Emilio, come on, man, there is a difference between pathology and architecture.

You can find crime and blight in any built environment. I'm not disagreeing with that. What I am saying is that there was a disproportionately high rate of crime and blight in these modern public housing projects. There is a reason why the type was phased out, and it wasn't because of some ivory tower academic architectural historian. There were a lot lessons learned from these projects, the importance of mixed-income and mixed-use development being one of many. But even beyond the extreme cases of failure like P-I, most of these projects were failures from the standpoint of sound urbanism; even the very best of these types of projects were sited on huge superblocks with a dearth of retail amenities isolated from the rest of the city by major roads and infrastructure. Maybe some of y'all like this type of development; I in fact live in one of these modern developments, but can recognize the flaws in its design. The fact that architects for some reason like to defend these projects when the rest of world has moved on I find incredibly depressing. Seriously try to make an argument in favor of P-I with an executive director of a CDC or a city planning commission member, and they will look at you cross-eyed (and then promptly ask to see the next architect).

The one on the right is the public housing project. Cheap balconies.

Also, the spread of the balconies on the left means that the units are huge.

wrong!!  neither is public housing.  and--the one on the left is the high-crime development....

Duh, it was a loaded question. I've been there before and past it many times. That's Park City Estates in Rego Park behind the Rego Park Center [Kohls].

Give us an actual comparison. You know, a comparison that's not a piece of land sold in 1969 for $10.00 to Carol Management Corporation to build a giant private housing project for Jews in order to create said Park City Estates (Block:  2093, Lot:  1).

Because if we really want a fair comparison, we need to compare buildings of similar styles in the city center. So, show me a public housing project and a regular apartment building in say lower Midtown. I'll take anything along 2nd or 9th avenues.

Pro-tip: Almost every building in Manhattan that has a raised brick planter or an iron fence around the entrance is or was a project.

Howard Roarke feels sad about ya'll lack of faith.

And what's this about Pruitt-Igoe? Yamasaki hardy considers that his 3rd most disasterious project he's mastermined. This one had to be blown up. His better ones were of self combusting, self collapsing kind. That's progress!

what are you fishing for here, james?  chelsea houses at 9th & 17th vs. mitchell-lama (or whatever) projects at 9th &23rd? are you setting up some sort of clever trap for why those aren't comparable either?  or village view at 1st and 6th vs. lillian wald at 6th and D?  can't wait to hear what rules those comparisons out...

3-4 blocks apart, in either case.  frankly, the grounds at wald are nicer than those at village view...

and besides, my argument wasn't about public housing vs. private, it was about how two very similar developments of very similar types in very similar settings can take very divergent paths based on policy.  what the land costs and whether they were built for jews, or whether you've ever been there,  is completely irrelevant.

a 'project'.  the loaded nature of this term, in an american urban context, is astounding.  park city estates was also (obviously) a 'project', as was every large-scale housing scheme.  and by the way, lefrak city (the one on the left) was one of the few 'projects' (again, NOT public housing) built without public funds.

inhabitants of public housing may be damaged because they're poor. and unemployed. and marginalized, and discriminated against. not because they live in high-rise brick towers.

...or because they're gamblers, or drinkers, or drug addicts...don't mean to imply that everyone's a victim.

@won, i live in a japanese project from the 60's and it looks like any ville radieuse plan out there...more or less.  what sets it apart is the good planning and indeed the fact that there are shops in the base of some of the superblocks (not ours, so we walk 600m to the next station, which is not a problem).  there is no crime here to speak of and the project is nearly 50 years old and looks brilliant with the massive trees planted like a forest.  mixed-income is also part of the deal, but again that is nothing to do with style.  not a drop of it.

as far as style goes i find the architecture i live in rather bland, white boxes. nothing to write home about.  the interior is brilliant however, with 15 meters width of balcony and all units south facing with natural ventilation and flexible rooms because the plans were based on farmhouses and sub-divided by fusuma (sliding doors) instead of walls.  it's brilliant.  really very good stuff and an education to live in .  this place is so much better than my house with a porch and a back alley back in canada.  in europe i hear there is even good archtiecture to go with the good modernist planning.

p-i failed from bad policy more than anything.  that it was not great architecture is fair enough, but so what?  lots of successful places to live that look like nothing special. 

anyway, what's the good story for our times ?  surely we don't need to rehash a decades old fairy tale still?

 What I am saying is that there was a disproportionately high rate of crime and blight in these modern public housing projects. There is a reason why the type was phased out, and it wasn't because of some ivory tower academic architectural historian. There were a lot lessons learned from these projects, the importance of mixed-income and mixed-use development being one of many.

are you saying that the prolonged high vacancy rates had absolutely nothing to do with the high rates of crime?  P&I never went above 60% occupancy.  and - as I've mentioned before - st. louis lost half its population between 1950 and 1970 - during which time more desirable and affordable housing opened up for those who wished to stay in the city (which was the main reason P&I was built in the first place).  this occurred all over the country during the same period and was the PRIMARY reason these developments began experiencing social problems. If you had a choice between a tiny apartment in P&I or something twice the size in a former mansion in the CWE or a whole house in Soulard for the same price - where would you choose to live?

I agree that the scale and spatial configuration made it a little more difficult to control criminal activity (although same can be true in older denser neighborhoods) - but to say that the physical design of P&I was a cause of crime is absurd.

and I never said I thought P&I was "good design."  the reason we've gone all new urbanist mixed use and lower density is because these places are competing with voucher programs and cheap, large spaces within existing building stock in less desirable neighborhoods - therefore you need diversity and "amenities" to attract people to live there - especially in cities (like yours) with declining or stagnant populations.  and in places with very little affordable housing stock and super high demand people are willing to live in smaller quarters in high-density buildings - which is why these developments tend to work better in places like Tokyo or NYC.

however - st.louis in the 40s was experiencing a major housing shortage - which is why they needed to build P&I in the first place - but I think what we learned is that the superblocks cannot easily adjust to drops in population and demand (hence smaller scales, mixed uses, variation in dwelling type) - and that no one predicted the rise of suburbia.

Won, it's not about "liking these types of developments".  I wouldn't live in a P-I type project, or Lefrak City for that matter, if you gave me all of Bill Gates' money.  That's not  what I'm arguing, and I've said as much above. You say "there were a lot of lessons learned from these projects, the importance of mixed-income and mixed-use development being one of many", and that's exactly the point: these lessons were learned over time, after several of these developments were built and their flaws became apparent.  What's being argued here is how much the planning and architecture alone contributed to its failure, as opposed to other very powerful forces, such as lack of security and maintenance of the project andthe isolation of one economic/racial class. 

Pathology is exactly the issue, because destructive forces, especially unchecked destructive forces, are harder to control than creative forces.  It takes a long time to build or create something good and it takes much less time to destroy it.  Think of, say, Dresden, just before and just after the fire bombing (I don't think I need to post pictures here).  Dresden took centuries to become the jewel it was, and it took one day to obliterate it from the face of the earth.  The forces at play in P-I were similar to a bombing but spread over a longer period (it's not for nothing that we say of urban decay that "this place looks bombed out"). 

At the beginning, by the testaments of many of its tenants, the P-I was just fine as a place to live.  Then, as the forces of destruction started to eat away at it not much was done to check them, and those forces won out.  To me, there is very little that Yamasaki could have done with his design -- in terms of scale of buildings, size of open space, size of corridors and units, amount of natural light, and variety of mixed uses -- that would have checked the destructive elements that were let loose on the project until its demise in 1972.

What I really think is that good architecture and urban planning can accentuate the positive aspects of communities, neighborhoods, and the lives of people who use the architecture, if there is a continuing, willfull, unflagging positive force to maintain a creation once it's in the world.  And it as to be continuous, as the forces of destruction, both natural and human, are constantly working away.  Once the destruction starts, though, and is let go unchecked, I think there is very little that "good design" alone can do to reverse or stop it.  (And, if nothing else, the fact that many of these projects first required the wholesale leveling of existing neighborhoods and housing, a huge destructive act (although I don't think it was the case for P-I) should have been the first clue that something was amiss with these projects, and it in fact was the case for many who criticized and fought their construction.)

Ok, I posted that before seeing toasteroven's post above, which makes similar points in a different way.  Anyway, the two sides of this argument are now pretty clear, and there's not much more I can add here on in.

If there is room for compromise on this, I think we've come to it; outside of a few sentences, I generally agree with both of your last posts.

Now on to the debt talks. ;)

Oh, Hello. What's your name?

"HOUSING ACT OF 1949," you say?

Can you tell me what provisions are required in the design, construction and operation of public housing? You can?

"The act requires the Housing and Home Finance Agency, and any other departments or agencies of the Federal Government having functions with inspect to housing to exercise their functions consistently with these national housing objectives and policies and in such manner as will encourage and assist (1) the production of housing of sound standards of design, construction, livability, and size for adequate family life; (2) the reduction of the cost of housing without sacrifice of such sound standards; (3) the use of new designs, materials, techniques, and methods in residential construction and the increase of efficiency in residential construction and maintenance; (4) the development of well-planned, residential neighborhoods and the development and redevelopment of communities; and (5) the stabilization of the housing industry at a high annual volume of residential construction."

Anything else? You want me to look at this?

"The local public agencies may provide their share either in cash or through the provision of parks or schools or other public facilities necessary to serve or support the new uses of land in the project areas, the installation of streets, utilities, and other site  improvements, or the use of municipal labor and equipment to clear a project area. While Federal loan assistance is available for projects involving open land, no capital grants may be made for such projects."

Oh, anything else?

"Federal assistance would be available to defray the costs of acquisition and clearance of slum areas and the preparation of the site of redevelopment; none of the funds would be available for building construction on the cleared sites, except that, in connection with the development of open or predominantly open areas, provision is made for temporary loans (repayable in not to exceed 10 years) for schools or other public facilities necessary to serve or support the now uses of land in the area."

Hmm, go on.

"The act reduces the maximum period for loans and annual contributions from 60 to 40 years and adjusts the basis for Federal contributions in accordance with the increased annual amortization requirements."

Yes, yes.

"The act fixes the limitation on the cost of construction and equipment of dwelling facilities to $1,750 per room. An increase in this cost limitation of not more than $750 per room is authorized in areas where it would not be feasible without such increase to construct sound housing. In no event may a project be undertaken which is of elaborate or extravagant design or materials."

Oh, continue.

"The act repeals existing equivalent elimination requirements, but substitutes a requirement that no financial assistance (other than preliminary loans) shall be made available, for any low-rent housing project unless the governing body of the locality involved agrees that there will be eliminated within 5 years after completion of the project unsafe or insanitary dwellings substantially equal in number to the number of newly constructed dwelling units provided in the project. Under the old requirement only one unsafe or insanitary dwelling unit could be counted, even though it may have accommodated several families. But under the new formula, if more than one family is living in an unsafe or insanitary dwelling unit the elimination of such unit shall count, as the elimination of units equal to the number of families accommodated."

Hmm, O.K..

"This title authorizes the Housing and Home Finance Administrator to undertake and conduct technical research and studies which will promote reduction in housing construction and maintenance costs and stimulate the increased production of housing. The research may also be concerned with improved building codes; standardized dimensions and methods for the assembly of home building materials and equipment; improved residential design and construction; new types of materials, equipment and construction; and may relate to appraisal, credit, housing needs, demand and supply, land costs, use and improvement, and related technical and economic research."

Interesting. Anymore? Nope?

I could say a lot about this discussion, maybe later.

What I do want to point out, and has been mentioned, Charles Jencks is a critic not a historian.  His critique is him advancing his agenda.  That is the beauty of being a critic or theorist you are not held to objective fact telling (or attempting to).

By "killing" modernism, he sets his argument up for discussion as a progressive new movement.  

sorry that goes back to the beginning of the tread a bit.  This whole thread is a great conversations...

and I am aware my post is me advancing my agenda.cheers

via A/N another review on the film

REVIEW> DESIGNED, DESPISED, DEMOLISHED

The Pruitt-Igoe Myth examines the human story behind the infamous housing project.

+

previously posted on Archinect in 2007 by our friend n_

A New Social Construct
by Clay Risen

"Modernism may be dead, but the world desperately needs radically new ideas about living, working, and governing in the 21st-century city."

I think a smaller version of the World Trade Center should be built there. A residential version instead of an office.