Pruitt-Igoe Reloaded

“Modern Architecture died in St Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3.32 p.m. (or thereabouts) when the infamous Pruitt-lgoe scheme, or rather several of its slab 3 blocks, were given the final coup de grace by dynamite.”_Charles Jencks

This project designed by Giacomo Pala is an attempt of developing an investigation about the possibility of having multiple objects contradicting each-other. Instead of a single Object Ontology, this design is a “Motley Ontologies” architecture sided against all of the architectural positivisms. It is an architecture that invokes an ironic, parodic and self-parodic conception of the discipline within the Avant-Garde agenda. This kind of architecture is able to ironically take advantage of the gap between Avant-Garde aspirations and reality, so as to incorporate the concept of multiplicities in the design strategies.

This architectural, theoretical and critical investigation takes place in the Pruitt-Igoe. The project’s gound is not the (in)famous district of Saint-Louis, Missouri. It is a theoretical ground. The real context is Jencks’s sentence about this place. In my project, Pruitt-Igoe is once again the set where modernisms’ drama takes place. A drama about the simultaneous and incongruent layering of two ontologies which produces the possibility of a different architectural condition.