Araştırma Makalesi

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

Cilt: 8 Sayı: 1 29 Nisan 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

Kaynakça

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Ayrıntılar

Birincil Dil

İngilizce

Konular

Yapılı Çevrenin Tarihi ve Teorisi

Bölüm

Araştırma Makalesi

Yayımlanma Tarihi

29 Nisan 2025

Gönderilme Tarihi

10 Nisan 2024

Kabul Tarihi

17 Eylül 2024

Yayımlandığı Sayı

Yıl 2025 Cilt: 8 Sayı: 1

Kaynak Göster

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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