Design & Philosophy : Existentialism And Pruitt Igoe
Does life have a purpose? It is a question which has plagued man kind since being capable of independent thought. Is there a master plan which has been laid out before us by some great all powerful deity? Has our existence up until this point been the eventuality of an anomaly? Does it matter that it it doesn’t matter?
Plato thought that we were all born with an essence inside us: a key part of us which mades you a thing. Everyone’s essence decided for them before they were born, this was our ‘plan’ for life. This is Essentialism.
Centuries later, Nietzsche argued that there was no such thing as essence. There is no plan because there is no religion and belief in one’s life being significant is meaningless! This was the birth of Nihilism.
But what if we create our own meaning from our own existence. That actually our existence precedes our existence. This is how we come to understand existentialism. There is no reason for anything and so we must create our own. Jean Paul Sarte’s theory makes sense for people, but does it hold true for products?
Where would Pruitt Igoe fall into this?
Pruitt Igoe was a social housing project in St Louis, Missouri. Designed by Minoru Yamasaki, it’s purpose was to rid the downtown area of inhabitable slums and bring in a new era of social housing for densely populated areas.
Mechanised labour had changed the fortunes of working class black families in the South of America during the 1950s. People were leaving the farms they had grown up on in search of a more prosperous life inside the city, where centralised wealth thrived and a different standard of living was to be expected.
The huge facilities at Pruitt Igoe gave people who had nothing their entire lives an opportunity to start again. ‘A poor man’s penthouse’ view for anyone who lived above the 6th floor meant that many of the residents had a lifestyle which challenged the most affluent up town residents. At the beginning the buildings were alive.
Everyone had a room of their own, a bed in that room and door to protect it. Smells wafted through the halls and music played late into the night. There was a community and trust between the residents. For many people, this was the happiest time of their lives.
Less than 20 years after the complex was built, it all lay in ruin. Along with the dreams and lives of it’s former residents. Pruitt Igoe had failed to find it’s essence. Or perhaps it did find it, only to have it taken away.
There were a couple of design flaws in the building; the incinerators were not large enough to cope with the residents’ needs; elevators would get stuck often. But all of this was over shadowed by disastrous policy from the welfare state. What had started out as an ambitious and revolutionary solution to urbanisation turn out to be merely a mock gesture.
The housing bill of 1950 stated that federal funds would be used to build these project but the concept was seen as communist and strong opposition ensured that no state money would be paid on the maintenance after construction.
Residents could not pay for maintenance so the buildings went unmaintained. garbage piled up outside of the overfilled incinerators. Windows were broken which in turn, led to more windows being broken (Broken Window Theory).
On top of all of this, the white middle classes who had once lived close by didn’t like the idea of a black neighbourhood in the city. City planners began building bungalows on the outskirts of the city with a plot of land for every family. The suburbs drew citizens out of the city centre, like poison from a wound. In 20 years, the population of St. Louis city had halved but the residents of Pruitt Igoe were living in residences designed for a city with a population 4 times the current amount. With less services came less service jobs and unemployment skyrocketed, there was simply nothing to do, confined to a huge apartment building which felt more like a prison than a home.
Massive over crowding in an empty city, refusal to pay for maintenance of titanic buildings and some very blatant racism led to the fall (literally) of the Pruitt Igoe projects.
Buildings which had once held the hopes and dreams of so many were ripped down to quell the rampant crime that lurked within. The essence of the building had been firmly stomped out.
Pruitt Igoe serves as a lesson to designers of all disciplines; there are many forces at work and a much bigger picture to every product. The residents were blamed for the problems but the blame lay with a society that failed to respect the other people as ends and not merely means. A utilitarian utopia built by the state, torn down by the state.
