Station 7: Zoetrope

The zoetrope – invented in 1834 and becoming popular from the 1860s onwards – ranks as one of the direct precursors of cinematographic viewing. It was a favoured children’s toy and also a popular attraction for grown-up habitués of salons and visitors to fairs. The zoetrope moving images on display here show the 1972 demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe high-rise housing development in St. Louis (US). Opening its doors 20 years earlier as one of the largest socially-integrated residential construction projects of its time, Pruitt-Igoe is now symbolic of the blunders of modern urban development and the failed social utopias of modern times. For the architectural historian Charles Jencks, the day of Pruitt-Igoe’s demolition in fact sounded the death knell for modernist architecture. In the modern era, architecture – not least that of Bauhaus – promotes in a way that no other creative discipline comes close to, new social models and a revised concept of humanity. Here we view these ruins – in a potentially endless visual loop – as they are created and dissipate.