The Pruitt-Igoe Myth: related film review media

Tied to the review of Chad Freidrich’s excellent documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth [M] (2011) at KQEK.com are the following links to several film and video clips at YouTube, providing additional visual material and info on the controversial housing project St. Louis, Missouri public housing project which opened its doors in 1954, and in 1971 saw the first of its 33 massive buildings imploded after a steady degeneration from an ideal design to a government-run slum.

Interviews with director Freidrich include an AFI Silverdocs Q&A and PBS Newshour, and there’s also a lecture  – “What Was Demolished?” – with Catherine Fennell (Columbia University Anthropology) and Reinhold Martin ( GSAPP) taped after a film screening at The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.

If you’re still hungry for more profiles of the complex, there’s an episode of Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New (1982), a slide show titled The Ghosts of Pruitt-Igoe, and amateur video footage (with variable audio & video) of the current site.

Mark R. Hasan, Editor