Gunther Herbst

Current Review(s)

The Man Who Wasn't There

‘We must rebuild, open up and clean up the hearts of our cities’, said Joseph Darst, mayor of St Louis, Missouri, in 1951. ‘The fact that slums were created with all the intrinsic evils was everybody's fault. Now it is everybody's responsibility to repair the damage.’ Darst was speaking of the city’s process of slum-clearing and rebuilding, specifically the creation of the Pruitt-Igoe housing development, which was first occupied three years later in 1954.

Pruitt-Igoe is now synonymous with modernism’s catastrophic failure to uplift the lives of those it most enthusiastically targeted. It’s the stuff of FINA- or ARCH-101 that modernism, as purveyed by Walter Gropius et al, aimed to address postwar social ills. The oracular professor intended his style of affordable, clean architecture to break decisively with the past and establish a new order of efficient, functional living. He famously said, ‘Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.’

11 August 2012 - 01 September 2012