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Pruitt Igoe Now seeks the ideas of the creative community worldwide: we invite individuals and teams of professional, academic, and student architects, landscape architects, designers, writers and artists of every discipline to re-imagine the 57 acres on which the Pruitt-Igoe housing project was once located.

U.S. Geological Survey photograph looking west toward Pruitt-Igoe with the adjacent George L. Vaughn Homes at right.

At 3:00 pm on March 16, 1972, the St. Louis Housing Authority demolished the first of thirty-three high rises of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project through detonation. One month later, the agency demolished a second tower. These highly-publicized and well-documented events were not supposed to usher the end of the notorious housing project, but to foster its rebirth. Instead these incidents would become trauma that has never been resolved for St. Louis, or for the nation.

Rebirth has never arrived. The spectacle of the detonations created momentum toward the accelerated death of Pruitt-Igoe, and led to public sentiment against high-rise housing and even modernist architecture. For decades, architects and historians have mythologized Pruitt-Igoe’s failure as the “death of modernism,” ..

Architects Awards

1st-US$1000

2nd-US$750

3rd-US$500

website: http://www.pruittigoenow.org/