Pruitt- Igoe

2014

30:00 Runtime

Pruitt-Igoe explores historical forgetting, image, and the American landscape. Pruitt-Igoe was an infamous 1950’s Modernist housing project best known for its rapid decline and ultimate destruction. Charles Jencks remarked, “Modern architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972 at 3:32 pm”. The site is now an urban forest and contains no traces of the buildings that once stood there. Influenced by Albert Speer’s Theory of Ruin Value, which claims ruins are maintained or destroyed in order to uphold particular regimes of history, my looping film traces the footprint of building C-15, the final building to be taken down. The camera moves through the dense overgrowth on a dolly track through the transition from dark to first light. The project emphasizes the production of the image, its relation to landscape and the processes of historical forgetting. Full Length Video.