Pruitt-Igoe was a public-housing complex of thirty-three eleven-storey slab blocks in St. Louis, completed in the mid-1950s to a celebrated modernist design by Minoru Yamasaki. Within little more than a decade it suffered chronic vacancy, disrepair, crime and the withdrawal of maintenance funding, compounded by segregation and the city's economic decline. Beginning in 1972 the authorities dynamited the blocks, and the televised collapse was broadcast as a vivid symbol of high-rise public housing's failure. The demolitions continued through the mid-1970s until the site was cleared.
Critic Charles Jencks famously declared its destruction 'the day modern architecture died', and it crystallised the turn against towers-in-the-park planning. The episode hardened public and professional scepticism toward large modernist housing estates worldwide.