Reframing the Ruins: Pruitt-Igoe, Structural Racism, and African American Rhetoric as a Space for Cultural Critique

The violent response of Pruitt-Igoe's tenants, who conflated their reading of the stark, isolating institutional structure with their readings of the structures of racism, most certainly drew attention to the force of the signifier—a prison-like structure of racism, but never a home. According to bell hooks, home is an especially important concept for African-Americans: "Throughout our history, African Americans have recognized the subversive value of homeplace, of having access to private space where we do not directly encounter white racist aggression" (yearning 47). In the case of Pruitt-Igoe and countless other public housing projects, home becomes a metaphor for white racist aggression—or more to the point, generations of African-Americans are being rendered "home"less, because the place they live cannot be a home; they are relegated to wasteland tracts that we must begin to view as contemporary urban reservations.<br />
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Urban housing projects like Pruitt-Igoe function as a sign of structural racism because they are part of a complex social and economic system that reinforces nihilistic behaviors by physically enforcing barriers to the opportunities this society affords middle-class whites. The relation of the architectural housing programs to the structures of our (racist) society assures that the structure of racism will be present in our structures. Architecture was and is informed by a series of beliefs that go nearly uninterrogated in American culture. In "Pruitt-Igoe and Other Stories," Mary Comerio writes, "While it is natural for architectural critics to focus on the stuff design is made of: space, proportion, structure, form and other essential elements of building, it is unnatural to ignore the social, economic, and political structure of society that ultimately shapes what architects do, how they do it, and why" (23). Though this is only one start, Gates's critical program may help provide a way for us to reread this one project as more than design alone, to unravel the historical entanglements between architecture and racism, and make a space for architectural critics to find creative ways to de(con)struct the structures of racism