Re-reading of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project (St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.) in the context of modernism

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2017

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Bölükbaş, Nihan

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This study examines one of the first examples of massive public housing projects in the 1950s, which was originally designed and built for middle and low income groups in North America. The Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project was selected as a significant sample in terms of the defined built environment. It came into existence as a social tool with its underlying discourse, architectural style and construction technique in the post-World War II U.S. However, due to a public decision, within twenty years, it was razed on the grounds of increasing vandalism, sexual assaults and muggings. This research mainly focuses on this ironic gap between the beginning and end points of the project in order to inquire into twentieth-century modernist urbanism as the underlying social project. In this manner, it proposes to place post-war modernist urbanism and architecture in the re-reading of Modernism and to deconstruct the meaning, represented in the ideas and underlying discourses of Pruitt-Igoe in Modernism. This inquiry is mainly conducted through the content of modernist urbanism, modernist architecture of the twentieth century and its social and spatial implications in the U.S.

Subject Keywords

Architecture, Architecture and society., Architecture, Domestic., Sociology, Urban.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12620707/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/26270

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Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

N. Bölükbaş, “Re-reading of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project (St. Louis, Missouri, U.S.) in the context of modernism,” M.Arch. - Master of Architecture, Middle East Technical University, 2017.