THE filmmakers behind “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” confronted a formidable task: to strip away the layers of a narrative so familiar that even they themselves believed it when they first set out to make their documentary. Erected in St Louis, Missouri, in the early 1950s, at a time of postwar prosperity and optimism, the massive Pruitt-Igoe housing project soon became a notorious symbol of failed public policy and architectural hubris, its 33 towers razed a mere two decades later. Such symbolism found its most immediate expression in the iconic image of an imploding building, the first of Pruitt-Igoe's towers to be demolished in 1972 (it was featured in the cult film Koyaanisqatsi, with Philip Glass's score murmuring in the background). The spectacle was as powerful politically as it was visually, locating the failure of Pruitt-Igoe within the buildings themselves—in their design and in their mission.
 
The scale of the project made it conspicuous from the get-go: 33 buildings, 11-storeys each, arranged across a sprawling, 57 acres in the poor DeSoto-Carr neighbourhood on the north side of St Louis. The complex was supposed to put the modernist ideals of Le Corbusier into action; at the time, Architectural Forum ran a story praising the plan to replace “ramshackle houses jammed with people—and rats” in the city's downtown with “vertical neighbourhoods for poor people.” The main architect was Minoru Yamasaki, who would go on to design another monument to modernism that would also be destroyed, but for very different reasons, and under very different circumstances: his World Trade Centre went up in the early 1970s, right around the time that Pruitt-Igoe was pulled down.
 
The promise of Pruitt-Igoe's early years was swiftly overtaken by a grim reality. Occupancy peaked at 91% in 1957, and from there began its precipitous decline. By the late 1960s the buildings had been denuded of its residents, the number of windows broken to the point where it was possible to see straight through to the other side. The residents that remained had to act tough for the chance to come and go unmolested. Critics of modernist architecture were quick to seize on the design of the buildings, arguing that such forward-thinking features as skip-stop elevators, which stopped only at the first, fourth, seventh and tenth floors, were wholly unsuitable and ultimately dangerous. Designed to encourage residents to mingle in the long galleries and staircases, the elevators instead created perfect opportunities for muggings. Charles Jencks, an architectural theorist, declared July 15th 1972, when Pruitt-Igoe was “given the final coup de grâce by dynamite”, the day that “Modern Architecture died”.
 
Directed by Chad Freidrichs and currently travelling the American film-festival circuit, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” complicates that picture by considering the larger context. The city of St Louis was undergoing its own postwar transformations, to which a project such as Pruitt-Igoe was particularly vulnerable. The city's industrial base was moving elsewhere, as were its residents: over a short period of 30 years, the population of St Louis had shrivelled to a mere 50% of its postwar highs. The Housing Act of 1949 encouraged contradictory policies, offering incentives for urban renewal projects as well as subsidies for moving to the suburbs. Federal money flowed into the construction of the projects, but the maintenance fees were to come from the tenants' rents; the declining occupancy rate set off a vicious circle, and money that was dearly needed for safety and upkeep simply wasn't there.
 
Abstract policy decisions and large-scale economic changes are difficult to render compelling, no matter the medium, but this documentary succeeds in finding the drama. Original footage from Pruitt-Igoe's early days, including a promotional reel replete with a buoyant, 1950s-era voiceover and cheerful primary colours, runs up against desolate photographs of the project's decline. The film also features interviews with several former residents of Pruitt-Igoe, who convey their hopefulness when they first moved in, as well as an affection for the buildings that for many of them persists to this day.
 
In their eagerness to challenge the Pruitt-Igoe myth, the filmmakers verge on suggesting that the design of the buildings had nothing at all to do with the failure that ensued. But critics of High Modernism can point to the counter-example of Carr Square Village, a low-rise housing project built in 1942 across the street, which didn't suffer from Pruitt-Igoe's escalating rates of vacancy and crime. Clearly many factors—economic, demographic, political and, arguably, architectural—converged on Pruitt-Igoe.
 
 “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” owes much to earlier academic work that exposed the seams in the dominant consensus. This eight-page paper by Katharine Bristol, published in the Journal of Architectural Education in 1991, offers more analytical rigour than could be captured in an 84-minute film. The difference, of course, is that the documentary carries a more visceral punch, which gives it the potential to reach the kind of wider audience that Ms Bristol's 20-year-old scholarly paper never had. In order to unseat a powerful narrative about the failure of modern architecture and public housing, the filmmakers have offered a powerful narrative of their own.