wonder why yamasaki buildings get bombed all the time, and rather
spectacularly at that.

pruitt igoe i thought was the result of planners meddling into what is
basically in architect's affair --

"The St. Louis Housing Authority operates seven other public housing
developments, and it claims that none of them comes close to Pruitt-Igoe in
the proportion of crimes and acts of vandalism committed.  Why?  Charles L.
Farris, the Authority's executive director, says Pruitt-Igoe is simply too
big.  With nearly 2,800 units and almost 11,000 inhabitants (12,000 if it
were full), it is four times the size of the second largest project. Its
sheer size and scale, Farris says. thwart all attempts at effective
management.

Architect Minoru Yamasaki, who designed Pruitt-Igoe, agrees that its size is
objectionable.  His original design called for a combination of garden
apartments and high-rise buildings accommodating,-- a density of 30 per
acre.  "PHA forced us to almost double the density [to 55]," Yamasaki said.
"The best we could do then was to eliminate the low-rise and add more
slabs."

http://bacweb.the-bac.edu/~michael.b.williams/Pruitt-Forum.html

there was a big discussion on pruitt igoe reconstruction a few years back,
references all over AIA Journal, Journal of Architectural Education,
Architectural Record and most other magazines from the UK and US showing how
architects were (as is usual) blamed for planning blunders. a missed
opportuinity, in my opinion, we should have engaged into some healthy
planner bashing (saying "look your assumptions were wrong, so was your
diagnosis - post factum, you blamed the innocents, and now you are still
clueless about this pruitt igoe business so clear out, if you don't mind,
and let us build many more Le Corbusier blocks because they seem to have
really worked everywhere")

i remember tedious lectures received from planners in CEPT and in Delhi,
1988 onwards, who still used pruitt igoe to substantiate their claims (that
architects are decorative artists, and hence trivial. or arcitects are
"romantics" and so they shouldn't do housing). i usually reacted by showing
them the great pre-planner urbanisms (mostly enlightenment cities, and stuff
by engineers and architects in the 20th century) and demonstrating by their
own figures and criteria as to how these functioned better. and than i used
to say "so quit using a fifteen year old peg to hang architects from, and
lay off, because you guys have done much worse". and then Sarajevo happened,
which i guess was much worse, but i don't really see planners saying, in the
same vein as stuff they said about pruitt igoe "so let's demolish planned
cities because they are designed by modern planners and therefore bad"

and WTC, Atta, another damned architect-planner
http://architettura.supereva.it/files/20011118/