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The Death of Symbolism |
| Section: MODERN THOUGHT / HOW SYMBOLS SHAPE CULTURE |
| Author: Stanley Trachtenberg |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/1997 |
| Size: 4,765 Words, 29,959 Characters |
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In July 1972, barely twenty years after construction first began on one of the defining symbols of modernism--the Pruitt-Igoe Housing in St. Louis--several blocks of the project were deliberately demolished.
Like many such ambitious urban renewal schemes, Pruitt-Igoe had been almost continuously vandalized since it opened and sustained a crime rate that made it all but unlivable. But perhaps the major reason for its failure, as noted architectural writer Charles Jencks suggested, was that its fourteen-story slab blocks were articulated in a purist language that had little to do with the needs of the people who lived there.
ARCHITECTURE AS SYMBOL
Built in the austere, machined look of what came to be known as the International Style of architecture, Pruitt-Igoe was a symbol at lea...
. . .
...ting it to that of others, a restless generation can identify itself solely by a mark--an X--rather than a signature. Unable, even unwilling, to risk forming an attitude toward the world, we remain indifferent to all but ridicule or shock. Meanwhile, we long to restore the idea of the sacred or the secular gods or heroes that--real or invented--we cling to as a distant if more hopeful memory.
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