Pruitt-Igoe Falls (2009)
By Cyprien Gaillard
On the afternoon of March 16, 1972, at approximately 3:00PM, a series of small explosions flashed from inside an eleven-story high rise apartment building on the north side of St. Louis, Missouri. The ensuing shock wave caused the building to shudder momentarily before it collapsed in on itself and a great plume of dust rushed upward and out. Following years of decay, crime, and governmental neglect, the detonation heralded not only the physical demolition of the whole 57-acre Pruitt-Igoe public housing project; the project’s destruction came to stand as a signifier of the failure of modern architecture to house the poor in livable environments. Cyprien Gaillard’s Pruitt-Igoe Falls revisits this symbolic death while leveraging artists’ historical treatments of the Sublime, or past efforts to stir an emotional response in viewers through the depiction of vast, irregular, and superhuman subjects. Pruitt-Igoe Falls does not employ footage of the eponymous project’s implosion; rather, Gaillard utilizes video from the controlled demolition of a tower block apartment at 2:30AM, July 13, 2008, in Glasgow, Scotland. As the building collapses, the concomitant dust cloud spreads to cover…
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