The Modernist Housing Project in the United States

Vision of the Futurist City by Antonio Sant’ Elia, c. 1914

LeCorbusier, Ville Contemporaine, c. 1922

Weissenhofseidling,Stuttgart, Germany, c.1927

LeCorbusier, Ville Contemporaine,c.1922

Frank Lloyd Wright, St. Mark’s in the Bowery Tower, project for social housing, ca.1929

Frank Lloyd Wright, Price Tower, Bartlesville, Oklahoma, c1950

Minoru Yasmaski, Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project, St. Louis MO, c1961

Modernism in crisis in the 1960s raised numerous questions, for instance:• Is it possible to pursue a social agenda through architecture?• Is a social agenda the same thing as social engineering?•What is the relationship of modern architecture to history and tradition?• Did modern architects hoodwink corporate America into accepting a socialist vocabulary to house the institutions of capitalism?• Should architecture derive its theoretical stance from socio-political theory and philosophy or is architecture capable of establishing its own agenda as a self-sufficient discipline?• Does form follow function or do function and form have some other relationship?• Is beauty a thing of the past and no longer a value we can pursue?