Stacking stories

Competition entrance in close collaboration with David Struik (www.OFDR.nl) “Modern Architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 pm (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt Igoe scheme, or rather several of its slab blocks, were given the final coup de grâce by dynamite.” Charles Jencks, The New Paradigm in Architecture: The Language of Post-Modernism Today the site of the Pruitt Igoe housing project is an overgrown brownfield forest marking modern architecture’s most contested moment and St. Louis’ urban renewal trauma. As the legacy of Pruitt Igoe is critically examined again, the site itself beckons. WHAT CAN A LEGACY OF LOSS AND FAILURE MEAN TO TODAY’S CITY OF ST. LOUIS? To guarantee a safe and healthy environment, to ensure job creation and a strong tax base, the city of St. Louis needs ideas and improvements. These improvements need to be situated in the existing city. More retail? Let’s extent existing shopping areas. New family housing? Let’s use empty plots to revitalize existing neighbourhoods. A communal garden? Make one in existing blocks. Let us weave in the existing tissue and not go for the tabula rasa again. The site of Pruitt-Igoe, therefore, should not be used for common urban programming; it should become a very site-specific experience. The site is currently a stacking of stories, a collection of failures, for some even a trauma. It is neglected as a place but painfully present as a memory; the graveyard of modern architecture. This memory should neither be removed nor reconstructed nor nourished as a symbol. The question is how collective memory can be transmitted over time, how it can renew its meaning for the city continuously. This project proposes a phased reclamation of the site, by cutting the original floor plan, block by block, out of the woods. New walking routes will slowly reveal the hidden memory, like walking paths in an English garden explore ruins and pavilions. The blocks themselves will be a celebration of the things which were important in our lives, but are gone in a painful way. We propose to turn the site into a cemetery. Thus Pruitt-Igoe will become a memory which renews itself; by stacking layer upon layer, life after life, story upon story.