New Life. Pruitt Igoe Now – the unmentioned modern landscape ©2012
Status: Competition
Client: Michael R. Allen and Nora Wendl
Design: Monolab, team: J.W. van Kuilenburg with M. Antos, F. Parraga Gamero, E. Pero Franco

NEW LIFE – PRUITT IGOE

…towards a co-operative winery

Today the site of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project is an overgrown brown field forest marking modern architecture’s most contested moment and St. Louis’ urban renewal trauma. As the legacy of Pruitt-Igoe is critically examined again, the site itself beckons. Can this site be liberated from a turbulent and mythologized past through re-imagination and community engagement?

APPROACH

Our approach is looking ahead through linking the history of Pruitt-Igoe to the history of St. Louis.

ST LOUIS

St. Louis is a damaged city. Consecutive city councils have neglected its citizens since the 1950’s. Spatial planning strategies have been impregnated with racial engineering, which led to exclusion, poverty, shrinkage and malfunction. The city lost 300.000 citizens, half of its population since WWII. This unprecedented population drain caused a rush, even from its inner city core. Despite recent efforts to change this, St Louis still faces large abandoned territories today: the city is already dying for over five decades. It’s time to act. This history however also offers unburdened outsiders the chance to supply a window of opportunities and define possible futures of immeasurable value for those who are in fact willing to look ahead. We took a new direction and defined Pruitt-Igoe as a new heart of the Carr Square Borough.

SPECIFIC HISTORY: WINE MAKING

By 1855, 500 acres of vineyard were in production and wine was being shipped to St. Louis and beyond. Missouri’s wine production continued to flourish. By the turn of the century, Stone Hill Winery, which the German immigrant Michael Poeschel began building in 1847, was the third largest winery in the world (second largest in the U.S.), producing more than a million gallons of wine a year. In fact, Missouri’s Weinstrasse region grew to include more than 100 wineries before coming to an abrupt halt in 1920 with the addition of the 18th amendment to the Constitution –Prohibition- which prohibited the manufacture and sale of alcohol in the United States. This amendment dealt a fatal blow to Missouri’s wine industry.

THE PRUITT-IGOE PLOT

The Pruitt-Igoe project was a clear and dramatic symptom of the directive, top down strategy. Pruitt-Igoe was a modern, radical experiment. Was America ready for this kind of social experiment? Definitely not ready, as Pruitt-Igoe required a bed of social coherence amongst its citizens which was already erased by its decision makers.

The future of Pruitt-Igoe lies in the contrapositions of its original parameters:
1977                                                2012
mono functional……………………multi functional
private………………………………… public
stone………………………………….  vegetation
zoned…………………………………  open
top down……………………………. bottom up
post industrial…………………….. post agricultural (pre natural)
discriminating………………………social
excluding……………………………. mixing
abandoned………………………….  attractive
radical………………………………… realistic
urbanized…………………………… natural
regulated……………………………. developing
suburban……………………………. central
immutable………………………….. adaptable
contained…………………………… borderless
incorporated………………………. productive
repetitive…………………………… unique
controlled………………………….. free
leaving generic rest space……. making social space

CONTEXT

The future of Pruitt-Igoe plot is defined by its surrounding context. The context of Pruitt-Igoe is largely defined by many abandoned, empty, urban plots. Our proposal is a positive, productive use of these plots. It should fit St. Louis climate and history. It should be organized by local citizens, give them pride and it should be able to grow and expand. Its production should be green and go beyond small scale urban agriculture. In terms of agriculture it should not repeat surrounding farming of crops. It should have a social heart.

THE PROPOSAL

Missouri has an impressive past of wine making. We propose a winery, organized as a co-operation of local citizens. Available plots are gradually planted with wine plants. The Pruitt-Igoe site will become a wine farm with a programmed wall, like a ‘hortus conclusus’, with an open social space at its heart for the Borough. The ‘figure and ground’ will be transformed from an urban desert with patches of green into a green landscape with spread buildings that will get a higher value. The Pruitt-Igoe wine farm will grow along its perimeter wall. The wall has openings linking streets into its heart, an active and public park, open to all citizens. The Pruitt-Igoe wine label will deliver high quality bottled wines. The boroughs that surround Pruitt-Igoe will benefit, the air will be clean, the horizons will be green and the citizens will be responsible, productive and full of life.