Chapter IV, Part I - The Road to Serfdom
‘The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else... it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.’
—John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest & Money.1
It is March 16th, 1972. St. Louis, Missouri. The Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project. Thirty-three buildings of eleven storeys stand, dilapidated, decaying, surrounded by wasteland. Most of the apartments within are vacant, their low-income residents driven away in earlier years by violence, crime, by a social fabric as ruined as the buildings they inhabited.
Without much fanfare, the explosives detonate and the first high-rise implodes. Given over to gravity by the blast, the building drags itself down. Dust spews forth. When it clears, rubble. Air where rooms once were; beneath, the unassuming ruins of a structure. The death of an idea.
The Pruitt-Igoe demolition attracted immediate and widespread commentary. Writer and theorist of post-modern architecture, Charles Jencks, famously declared it the end of a paradigm. ‘Modern architecture died in St. Louis Missouri on July 15th, 1972 at 3:32pm’. Jencks got the date wrong, but it didn’t matter. Soon his idea became dogma and the architecture profession continued its shift away from the ideologies of modernist design.
The buildings, designed by Japanese-American architect Minoru Yamasaki, started construction in 1951. Inspired by Le Corbusier’s ville radieuse concept, they were part of the effort in post-war America to spend government funds on projects that improved the nation’s collective welfare, modernised its cities, and kept the economy growing. But just twenty years later, they had fallen into unliveable squalor. As a social project, they had failed. To critics and reactionaries, the Pruitt-Igoe buildings had become a symbol of the misguided ambitions of New Deal America. The destruction was a judgement of its naive, utopian vision. A reckoning for the progressive politics that insisted that humanity could be bettered through design, intervention, or bold and positive political projects.
Minoru Yamasaki, the project’s architect, was embarrassed by the failure of his design. Yet the failure of Pruitt-Igoe was soon counterbalanced by a great professional success. For in April 1974, Yamasaki attended an opening ceremony for one of his new designs—the world’s second-tallest building, which stood next to the world’s tallest building, which he also designed: Towers 1 and 2 of New York’s World Trade Center.
Unlike the Pruitt-Igoe project, the World Trade Centers were not designed in pursuit of collectivist, humanistic ideals. Instead Yamasaki’s new towers were built for political purposes almost totally opposed to his failed social housing projects. Instead of housing people in poverty and need, the buildings would house some of the world’s most powerful and influential banks, media companies and financial corporations. Instead of public care, the buildings were private power, solidified.
Yamasaki’s Towers soon became one of the foremost symbols of American power in the late 20th century. The hegemon’s logo: they were both private and global, imposing and abstract. As repetitive gestures towards sheer size that narcissistically referred to nothing but themselves, the towers symbolised the logic of late American empire that sought to close the world economic system around itself—the unilateral use of technology, finance and private power, all backed by government money, to reshape the world’s order in its own image.
Between the collapse of Yamasaki’s social housing project and the opening of his World Trade Center, we find a synecdoche for the political changes that would soon alter Western societies in a radical way—the transition from Keynesian-style welfare-state economics, where world economies were governed by a system of fixed-exchange rates known as the Bretton Woods system, to finance-driven neoliberalism.
References
Baudrillard, J. (1983) Simulations. New York, Semiotexte.
Keynes, J. M. (1936) The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London, Palgrave Macmillan.
Footnotes
See The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, chapter 24.