Tags
Arts, asbestos, Burns Building, Dunedin, Otago, Pruitt-Igoe, sewerage, sheep's arse, traumatized
Perhaps the most famous urban housing project was St. Louis’s Pruitt-Igoe – a paragon of modernist vision, theoretically perfect in conception, and – as a result – an unmitigated disaster for human habitation. Built in 1954, the multi-story housing was such a failure that it had to be demolished by 1972.
But here in Dunedin, we have our own monument to modernist vision. And it has survived!
Dunedin’s own Pruitt-Igoe is known as The Burns Building, and is home to the outcasts and pariahs of academia (practitioners of the Arts). While Pruitt-Igoe was unable to withstand the postmodern turn of the latter Twentieth Century, the inhabitants of The Burns Building (and in particular the long-time prior inhabitants of the fifth floor) have blissfully ignored such passing trends. Despite the lingering asbestos, the sewerage smells which waft up from the ground floor, and a design which shows all the aesthetic flair of a sheep’s arse, The Burns Building has withstood the test of time!
Today, the legacy of Pruitt-Igoe survives only in photographs and the trauma-plagued eggshell minds of its former inhabitants. But The Burns Building survives and continues to traumatise its own inhabitants to this very day.
But let these pictures speak for themselves:
Pruitt-Igoe:
Burns:
Pruitt-Igoe:
Burns:
Pruitt-Igoe:
Burns:
Pruitt-Igoe:
Burns:
Pruitt-Igoe:
Burns:
Pruitt-Igoe:
Burns:
The Dunedin School 
Tyrone,
It’s great to see the Burns building getting a fitting tribute. The Communist Bloc architectural style is due for a comeback in New Zealand. Any day now.
In the spirit of fairness, it worth noting that Burns has just undergone a thorough remodel on the inside, something you can’t in these pictures, or for that matter from inside the building itself.
Eric
A polished turd remains a turd.
A turd will indeed always be a turd, polished or not. Read the fancy new italics above …
I think we can all agree that the parallels between Pruitt-Igoe and Burns are undeniable. I’m also reminded of Park Hill and Norfolk Park in Sheffield. And Park Hill is actually a listed building.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Hill,_Sheffield
Pingback: Dysenchanted Worlds: Rationalisation, Dystopia, and Therapy Culture in Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit « The Dunedin School
Is this what we used to call the Arts Building in the 1970s – opposite the library, when Otago had a German AND Russian Dept, and a French Dept? Where Alan Musgrave held forth on Sextus Empiricus and Karl Popper?
But Pruitt-Igoe was a place of despair and hope confounded, whereas love and imagination flourished in these beloved rooms.
Brian, that’s the one. Nice to hear your memories. But some things remain the same. I’m sure you can still hear Alan Musgrave on the ol skeptic and the Philosopher of Christchurch, within its walls.
Ah, I’ve never heard Karl Popper called ‘the Philosopher of Christchurch’, but I do remember an afternoon of reverie in the uni library opposite the Burns Building when I discovered, and read through a large part of, ‘The Open Society and Its Enemies’, and was pleasantly surprised to discover he wrote it during his exile in the City of the Plains. Just think what he could have achieved if he had gone instead to NZ’s premier university 200 miles* south!
As a chauvinistic Dunedinite I would always greet the incoming students from the northern fleshpots, ‘Ah, you’ve come south to be educated!’
Of course, we had not reached the more recent level of political consciousness of today’s scarfies with their burning sofas of popular resistance. We just piled into the Captain Cook (which I hope is still extant). Semper sint in flore!
(*Sorry, I’ve lived in England for many years & don’t know how to convert into km.)