USA: Pruitt Igoe Now Ideas Competition
Entries due Friday, March 16, 2012.
March 2012 will mark the 40th anniversary of the demolition of the first of the Pruitt-Igoe high-rises designed by architects Helmuth, Yamasaki and Leinweber. For forty years, the site of this complex has been largely untouched. As countless other social housing projects across the country are torn down and rebuilt in the idiom of new urbanism, the question remains: what is Pruitt-Igoe now? The subject is this competition the 57-acre site of the long-mythologized Pruitt and Igoe housing projects — a site whose future is intertwined with emerging ideas about urban abandonment, the legacy of modernism, brownfield redevelopment and land use strategies for shrinking cities. This competition seeks the ideas of the creative community worldwide: we invite individuals and teams of professional, academic, and student architects, landscape architects, urban planners, designers, writers, historians, and artists of every discipline to re-imagine the site and the relationship between those acres and the rest of the city.