Creative Destruction and Urban Space

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the deliberate destruction of the city (“creative destruction”), clearing out older buildings to make way for newer, more profitable ones. Penn Station’s demolition is the most notorious example, and the chapter examines the way photographers represented its demise and how it ignited a new preservation movement. Life magazine carried the story of urban renewal through the post–World War II period, including its coverage of the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe project in St. Louis, which came to symbolize the failures of government-subsidized housing. While creative destruction was considered a necessary cornerstone of capitalism, artists were critiquing the process in works of parody (Robert Smithson) and in the dramatic dismantling of buildings (Gordon Matta-Clark). The whole question of the “life cycle” of buildings and cities is considered, focusing on the work of Alan Berger in his theory of “drosscape” and in Rem Koolhaas’s notion of buildings with a fixed life.