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- Title
Reframing the Ruins: Pruitt-Igoe, Structural Racism, and African American Rhetoric as a Space for C.
- Authors
Birmingham, Elizabeth
- Abstract
In July 1072 the first three buildings of St. Louis's Pruitt-Igoe were dynamited. Since that time, Pruitt-Igoe's failure has been described as a design flaw wrought upon the unsophisticated poor by well-meaning intellectuals. Shadowed by this ascendant myth are issues of race and poverty. Through a framework of rhetorical analysis based on Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s articulation of signifyin(g), I examine Pruitt-Igoe not as a symbol of the failure of an architectural style, but as a possibility for re-reading and writing urban texts in ways that critique structural racism and the ways in which architectural systems (like other social systems) reinforce it.
- Subjects
MISSOURI; SAINT Louis (Mo.); UNITED States; BUILDING sites; LANGUAGE of Post-Modern Architecture, The (Periodical); RACISM
- Publication
Western Journal of Communication, 1999, Vol 63, Issue 3, p291
- ISSN
1057-0314
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1080/10570319909374643