You have to take sides in this debate: Are you for modernism in architecture or against it? There is no standing in the middle or on the sidelines. You must be one or the other. If you are, like me, for modernism, even high modernism, and all that the international school represents, what you believe is this: Architecture can provide for the masses aesthetically pleasing living machines in dense urban areas. In short, you believe in utopia, in high living standards, in the universality not just of the basics but of the beautiful. This was the thinking that initiated the creation of the housing projects in the United States. In the 1930s, urban planners and politicians believed that social housing could replace slums, that 20th-century social engineering could replace 19th-century social Darwinism, that progress was real only when it reduced poverty and socially manufactured misery.

After World War II, the United States had the money and optimism to fully realize the social housing experiments of the 1930s. In the early 1950s, the city of Saint Louis built 33 Corbusian towers, 11 stories each, to house the poor blacks. The housing project, called Pruitt-Igoe, would have been a great success if the United States had not abandoned urban housing for suburban housing. This is the argument that director Chad Freidrichs makes in the sad but beautifully photographed documentary The Pruitt-Igoe Myth. (The film will be screened as part of the Seattle Design Festival, which is happening September 20–23.) The myth is this: Modernist social housing failed because poor people are horrible and should not be concentrated. Architecture was naive to think that design could make them better, more responsible citizens. But the truth is this: The modernist program was abandoned by the city and the federal government. Money instead went to infrastructure for the suburban mode of transportation, the automobile, and tax deductions for the suburban mode of living, single-family homes. The documentary has interviews with people who lived in Pruitt-Igoe, and the general feeling they express is that the project would've worked had it received real public support.

In the early 1970s, just two decades after its construction, Saint Louis began demolishing Pruitt-Igoe. On the day the last building was dynamited, July 15, 1972, Charles Jencks, an architectural historian, declared that "modern architecture died." SIFF Cinema at the Film Center, Sat Sept 22 at 7 pm.