Continuing to delve into the "Watchmen" soundtrack, I did a search for the title of the Philip Glass track "Pruit Igoe" used on the soundtrack - a track that's originally from the movie "Koyaanisqatsi". Now "Koyaanisqatsi" is one of my all time favourite movies, but doing the search, I actually learned stuff about the demolition scene in the film that I never knew before. Cool!
From Wikipedia:
Pruitt-Igoe was a large urban housing project first occupied in 1954[2] and completed in 1955[3] in the U.S. city of St. Louis, Missouri. Shortly after its completion, living conditions in Pruitt-Igoe began to decay; by the late 1960s, the extreme poverty, crime, and segregation brought the complex a great deal of infamy as it was covered extensively by the international press.
At 3 PM on March 16, 1972[4] — less than 20 years after construction — the first of the complex's 33 buildings was demolished by the federal government.[5] The other 32 buildings were destroyed over the next 2 years. The high-profile failure of Pruitt-Igoe has become an emblematic icon often evoked by all sides in public housing policy debate. The Pruitt-Igoe housing project was one of the first demolitions of modernist architecture and its destruction was claimed by postmodern architect Charles Jencks to mark, "the day Modern architecture died."[6] Footage of the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe was incorporated into the film Koyaanisqatsi.
So basically Pruitt-Igoe was like real life version of a J.G. Ballard novel?
Watch 9 memorable minutes from the film here:
For other fans of the Koyaanisqatsi film, here's an interesting article from The New Yorker about the music : "Sound and Vision - Glass’s “Koyaanisqatsi” and the art of film scoring."
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