Research Article

Entangled histories of Architecture and Dispossession in The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011)

Volume: 8 Number: 1 April 29, 2025
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Entangled histories of Architecture and Dispossession in The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011)

Abstract

This paper addresses how documentary film may attend to, mediate, and negotiate the histories of the entanglement between housing and dispossession. For this purpose, it focuses on Chad Freidrichs’ 2011 documentary film The Pruitt-Igoe Myth that centers the accounts of Pruitt-Igoe’s African American residents. As it is well-known, the media images as well as the initial scholarly accounts of the demolishment of the housing complex have largely served as an icon of reactions against modernist architecture. The majority of later accounts, while steering the conversation away from a sole focus on architecture, singled out one or two aspects of this intricate tangle and approached the residents of the complex as passive victims rather than active agents. Here, The Pruitt-Igoe Myth constitutes a unique case not only within the popularized and highly mediatized conceptions of but also the extensive sholarship on the building complex. The paper argues that, in its centering of the first-hand accounts as well as documents of lives that unfolded in the building complex, this documentary offers us a more open mode of architectural historiography that centers the complex intersections of structural racism, dispossession, and built environment.

Keywords

References

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Details

Primary Language

English

Subjects

History and Theory of the Built Environment

Journal Section

Research Article

Publication Date

April 29, 2025

Submission Date

April 10, 2024

Acceptance Date

September 17, 2024

Published in Issue

Year 2025 Volume: 8 Number: 1

APA
Pınar, E. (2025). Entangled histories of Architecture and Dispossession in The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011). GRID - Architecture Planning and Design Journal, 8(1), 241-262. https://doi.org/10.37246/grid.1467404

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