Completed in St. Louis in 1954–56, Pruitt-Igoe housed some twelve thousand people in thirty-three eleven-storey blocks. It was designed by Minoru Yamasaki, later the architect of the World Trade Center, and praised in the architectural press of the day: tall blocks in green space, wide open ground, clean sanitary flats, exactly as the Athens Charter proposed.

Within twenty years the project had become unliveable. The causes lay largely outside the building: federal law paid for construction but not for maintenance, which was to come out of rents; as St. Louis deindustrialised, population and income fell, vacancy reached sixty per cent, and lifts and plumbing failed. Racial segregation was another layer: the project was designated for Black families while lending policy subsidised the white middle class into the suburbs, emptying the city. On 16 March 1972 the first block was dynamited; all of them were gone within four years.

The footage of the demolition became a turning point in architectural theory — Charles Jencks wrote in 1977 that modern architecture died that day and declared the date the beginning of postmodernism. That reading was later much criticised for ignoring the maintenance regime and the city's economy; the 2011 documentary *The Pruitt-Igoe Myth* is the best-known correction. The professional effect was nevertheless real: the scheme of tall blocks in empty green space was abandoned, and user participation and small-scale housing related to the street returned to the agenda. The lesson that how a building lives depends as much on how it is governed as on how it was designed also comes from here.