Virgo/Pisces as Controlled Demolition: Koyaanisqatsi & The Pruitt Igoe Myth
Or: the invisible string theory of Minoru Yamasaki // the evils of dust
All systems live or die by the health of their parts. A system in denial of its own decline, when pushed, resorts to controlled demolition. This solves things for a time. The demolition atomizes the dysfunction and spreads it outward in a particulate mist, a dust fine enough that it can pass through the walls of the house and the walls of the cells. Then begins a lull: a series of misfired DNA replications or missed rent payments, spread out over time and the source of the damage obscured. The lull that stretches between the initial demolition and the later disease can and will be called resolution.
The Pruitt Igoe housing complex in St. Louis has lived as a symbol for far longer than it ever did as a structure. Opened in 1954, the complex had fallen into complete disrepair by 1968 due to maintenance issues and city neglect. In 1972, demolitions began and the lot was wiped entirely by 1976. Its demolition was broadcast live on television and heralded, at the time, as the symbolic 'death of modernism’. On its surface, Pruitt Igoe’s demolition was a pin in the line of the American narrative, one that swept up any remaining dregs of the New Deal and ushered in the beginning of Reaganomics with a bang.1
As is the case with all symbols, Pruitt Igoe’s significance has a radial structure of resonance that covers a lot of metaphorical (and literal) ground. There is Pruitt Igoe as a symbol of post-war urban renewal, as manufactured crisis, as a microcosm to the concurrent decline of St. Louis post World War II. Those are legible symbols. There’s also a strange and eerie reverberation to what happened at Pruitt Igoe that crops up in history’s less legible, more poetic synchronicities. There’s the blank swath of forest in the middle of St. Louis, the concentration and dispersal of poisons, an architect whose buildings kept turning to dust. Pruitt Igoe was both an event of systemic breakdown and invisible dissolve.
On Tuesday the 17th we had a lunar eclipse across the Virgo/Pisces axis with the moon in Pisces conjunct Neptune. It was a partial eclipse and the first in an upcoming series that will occur across the Virgo/Pisces axis through 2025 and 2026. As a zodiacal pair, the Virgo/Pisces axis is the axis of form and formlessness. Virgo is the earth sign ruled by Mercury. It is material shaped to be socially useful; a connective tissue drawing neutral data points together to create a usable but flexible structure. Virgo rules things like religious practice, medicine, and social care. Pisces is the water sign ruled by Jupiter with Neptune’s influence. It represents the principle of formlessness; it is the spirit that animates Virgo’s structure and gives it purpose. Pisces is the concept of God that the religion worships, the health or disease that medicine attempts to maintain or banish. Virgo is in a constant state of trying to contain Pisces while Pisces is constantly evading containment. Together, Virgo and Pisces are the principle of endless material cyclicality, i.e., what goes up, must come down.
There are two films that directly depict Pruitt Igoe. The first is 2011’s The Pruitt Igoe Myth, an excellent documentary by Chad Friedrichs, and 1982’s Koyaanisqatsi, the Philip Glass-scored film poem by Godfrey Reggio. Myth is straightforward and comprehensive. The film covers the surrounding historical context of Pruitt Igoe’s rocky beginnings as a part of St. Louis’ urban renewal efforts as well as its human history as a community and hub of tenant organization in its later years. Koyaanisqatsi utilizes the iconic images of Pruitt Igoe in the state for which the complex is most famous: destroyed, gutted, and eventually demolished. The film surrounds the Pruitt Igoe footage with more footage of other industrial demolitions. Myth does the Virgoan work of shaping out Pruitt Igoe’s place within American social narrative, Koyaanisqatsi does the Piscean job of smoothing the infamous housing complex into a part of the larger whole.
In the 40s and 50s the only way for St. Louis seemed to be up. By 1947 St. Louis’ population was peaking at 850,000 and the city’s planner, Harland Bartholomew, had been hard at work for decades making St. Louis more amenable to cars and less amenable to its Black working class. With the Housing Act of 1949, Bartholomew and the Housing Authority were licensed to clear the city’s unsightly slums along its central corridor and replace them with housing developments. Pruitt Igoe was part of this project, a complex that was designed to tempt wealthier, White tenants back to the city center while also rehousing the Black residents that had been displaced by the city’s re-zoning2.
The city hired a young architect, Minoru Yamasaki, for the project. Yamasaki was a true soldier of post-war modernism, a Corbusier fan and an early adopter of the Internationalist style of design that had become the movement’s signature. But his plans were hampered by budget problems from the start — Yamasaki had designed the complex as mixed-level and containing swaths of green space. Both of these ideas were nixed. Pruitt Igoe would instead be 33 buildings of identical height with no landscaping. The result was imposing, a row of ahistorical concrete monoliths slapped in the middle of the city.
Pruitt Igoe was set up for failure from the beginning. Within a year of its opening the building was mandated to integrate due to the passing of Brown v. Board of Education. All 40% of its White residents left, meaning that Pruitt Igoe became an all-Black housing complex in the middle of the city under care of the government. Due to some bizarre and racist ordinances, maintenance costs for Pruitt Igoe were extracted from rent. When the poorer residents could not pay, the building did not get maintained.
The damage happened exponentially and fast — trash piled in the yards and chutes and often caught fire, pipes froze and sewage flooded hallways, elevators broke and trapped people inside them. Law enforcement’s reluctance to patrol the complex meant that the stairwells became sites for assaults and robberies. Of course, had the state decided to allocate money for maintenance and wind back some of the more paternalistic and carceral laws for its residents on welfare (no phones, no TV, no able bodied man was permitted to live with his family), some if not all of this could have been avoided. But the feedback loop was convenient for the already-unenthusiastic Housing Authority, who had never wanted Pruitt Igoe to exist in the first place.
The first of Pruitt Igoe’s televised demolitions in 1972 were a town-square execution, a shortcut guilty verdict laid upon its residents — clearly, this was what happened when the city reached out a hand. “If Yamasaki, in common with Le Corbusier and other modernists, believed that rational architecture could make people behave better, Pruitt Igoe seemed to prove the opposite. So, in [architect Charles Jencks's'] words: "It was finally put out of its misery. Boom, boom, boom."'3 Pruitt Igoe’s decline and destruction were acts of malevolent negligence by the state, engineered to ensure that all future support for public housing and the social safety net would be complicated by invoking its name.
There is an element of the historical at play with this eclipse. Trine and sextile to the full moon are Pluto at 29º of Capricorn and Uranus at 27º of Taurus, both of which are sextile to Neptune at 28º in Pisces. All three of these outer planets — the ‘generational’ planets, as they are called — are involved in this eclipse in a formation that we will not see again in our lifetimes.
By 2026, the outer planets will have moved from water and earth signs into fire and air — Pluto into Aquarius, Neptune into Aries, and Uranus into Gemini. This alignment and the quick succession by which these ingresses happen is unprecedented astrologically and historically, and creates a kind of impenetrable divinatory wall beyond which I find it difficult to speculate. We just haven’t seen anything like it. I think it’s fair to say that now, in 2024, we would orient America’s 21st century narrative around a few key hinge points: pre and post 2020, 2008, and 9/11. I am curious if 2025-26 will make all three irrelevant and, if so, at what speed. This eclipse is foreshadowing disguised as a mercenary of the already obsolete.
Pruitt Igoe’s other starring role, Koyaanisqatsi is, if you can forgive the phrase, a vibes-based film. It works via immersion, comparison, and sequence, to say nothing of Philip Glass’ apocalyptic score. The movie is one, long, silent implication and watching it makes one feel like they are on the precipice of understanding something big and important. By the end of the film it’s hard to say what that is without sounding like a college freshman. What Koyaanisqatsi does do is conjure the existential dread that naturally occurs when anything is viewed at such a scale, giving the overall impression that an infrastructure is crumbling under the weight of compensatory myth. It is, as a whole, extremely Piscean.
What is most striking about the Pruitt Igoe demolition footage in Koyaanisqatsi is just how easily those buildings go down. Within seconds stone turns to liquid sand, to billows of dust. The film was made two decades before 9/11 but any viewer living on this side of the towers falling will immediately have those images of dust clouds in Lower Manhattan at the forefront of their minds. The split-second shift in state from modernist dinosaur to particulate nothingness in both cases is eerie, unnatural.
If you’re familiar with architectural history you might already know that Minoru Yamasaki, architect of Pruitt Igoe, also had the unfortunate privilege of being lead architect on the World Trade Center. This means that Yamasaki designed not one, but two buildings whose destruction as captured in images are metonymic for the shift in American epochs their destruction precipitated. There’s a Piscean push-pull, here (Pisces, two fishes swimming in opposite directions in an eternal circle), that tugs at the edges of historical linearity. What’s more significant? The fact that Yamasaki designed both buildings, or the fact that this has become American narrative canon? When a building explodes, an era changes.
This eclipse is closely conjunct Neptune. As a visual metaphor to represent the activities of Neptune, one might employ, say, ‘a video broadcast of a billowing cloud of dust’. Neptune rules things like cameras and images. It also rules the principle of oneness and the process of dissolution it takes to get there. Richard Tarnas describes Neptune in Cosmos and Psyche as embodying the principles of "liquidity and dissolution, the amniotic and prenatal, the permeable and undifferentiated.”4 As an energetic force in the matrix of the physical and of narrative, Neptune atomizes and spreads, infiltrates and infects. Neptunian information is seductive and conspiratorial, walking the knife’s edge of plausibility for just long enough to be compelling. This is all to say: 1972 was not Pruitt Igoe’s first encounter with dust.
Simultaneous to the boosterism of St. Louis that precipitated Pruitt Igoe’s construction was another gross overreach of government power: The Manhattan Project. I am now pulling largely from the work of Devin Thomas O’Shea and his article about Pruitt Igoe’s subjection to fallout testing in the 50s and 60s by the Army Chemical Corps. Curious about possible effects of radiation on soldiers and on enemy cities, the Army conducted covert “cloud” experiments under the banner of the Manhattan Project in a few American cities, but prominently across the poorer areas of St. Louis.
The Army chose St. Louis for a few reasons — its structural similarity to Moscow and the readily available housing projects of poor and Black residents who would be powerless to object. These experiments involved releasing toxic chemicals such as cadmium-zinc mixture and a compound named “FP 226”, theorized as either radium or cadmium, in clouds over Pruitt Igoe and other poor neighborhoods and public housing projects. The head of the project, Philip Leighton “noted that particle sizes of the material should be kept between 0.75μ and 3.0μ, “so small, the particles could probably be inhaled and deposited deep in the lung.”’5 Nine years later, from 1963-65, the experiments were repeated. Over one ton of toxic chemicals was released by the military over the Pruitt Igoe and St. Louis in just those two years alone.6
When Minoru Yamasaki’s other famous architectural commission, the Twin Towers, collapsed in 200 they released over 2,500 different carcinogens into the air. A 2010 survey of 9/11 first responders found that every single one of the survey’s 5,000 subjects was suffering from impaired lung function due to inhalation of the tower dust nine years previously.7 A former Pruitt Igoe resident recently filed a lawsuit with the city over the resulting cancer deaths that precipitated from the Chemical Corps’ experiments. “Nearly every funeral I had gone to [among former residents] was a cancerous death… They should have come out and said we put this cadmium sulfide in the air.”8 That’s two Yamasaki designs whose explosions have resulted in toxic dust. I need his chart.
We run into problems with Virgo/Pisces when we assume that our histories, narratives, and dysfunctions will disappear with the explosion of their most obvious form; that the explosion will not make their influence even more malignant or important for being invisible. If I’m looking to potential future manifestations of the themes I’ve been trying to turn over during this eclipse, I am eyeing what we might start to learn about the longer-term effects of COVID (an airborne virus, very Neptunian) when Neptune and Saturn move into Aries next year.9 It’s my hypothesis that planets ingressing into Aries from Pisces can bring with them some particularly loud and obvious consequences of any Piscean obscuration that may have occurred previously. The USA has its natal Neptune in Virgo in its 10th house of legacy, meaning that these eclipses could churn up the US’ difficulties with Neptunian themes in quite a public way over the next two years. I don’t think it’s crazy to say that this country has a history of being less than truthful about the dangers of what’s in the air.
I’ve talked a lot about the public history and symbolism of Pruitt Igoe. The housing complex was also a site of hope and community, however brief. Due to their concentration, tenants at Pruitt Igoe were able to organize efficiently, even staging a rent strike to protest city negligence in 1969. Memories of the housing complex as the nicest place that many former residents had ever lived are repeated frequently in Friedrichs’ documentary. In fact, most of the things that the former residents have to say about Pruitt Igoe are positive. It is easier to talk about systemic breakdown when you’re using the distance of metaphor; not so easy when it comes to that system’s effects on human lives. The integrity and potential of the Virgo/Pisces axis lies in its significations of health and care: healing through medicine, the sanctuary of religious spaces, the social safety net. Everything that threatens breakdown also contains within it the tools to reform.
Further Reading / Other Sources:
True Anon interview with Devin O’Shea
Grey Scape: “Modernism Was Framed: The Truth About Pruitt-Igoe”
Richard Tarnas, Cosmos and Psyche, pg. 97.
O’Shea.
O’Shea.