In the history of urban design as it is currently taught, the story of the American low-rent public housing program can be neatly encompassed in a pair of images. On the left we would see, rising up, Le Corbusier’s 1925 Plan Voisin for Paris — that great shock image of twentieth-century urbanism, the ultimate urban-renewal project. The Plan Voisin not only called for the demolition of the historic core of Paris and its replacement by high rise towers-in the-park, but it announced modernism’s ruthless attitude toward the past and its demand for a revolutionary redesign of the city. On the right, we would see, crashing down, one of Minoru Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe high rise public-housing towers in St. Louis, demolished in 1972 after they had become uninhabitable. With brute finality, the Pruitt-Igoe demolition seemed to mark both the bankruptcy of an important program of social transformation through modernist design, and, by implication, the return to traditional patterns of urbanism. Charles Jencks used the precise hour of the first explosion to announce that “modern architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri, In this article, I do not wish to challenge the conventional wisdom that the public-housing towers were bad design, still less to deny that the traditional neighborhoods often embodied a far superior urbanism. But I do wish to challenge the presumed central responsibility of modernist design for the failure of low-rent public housing.3 Clearly, if the towers and the neighborhoods were suffering a similar fate, there were massive destructive forces at work that overwhelmed what might ordinarily have been significant design differences. To employ a metaphor: ordinarily, it makes a great deal of difference whether a swimmer venturing out into the surf is a novice or an Olympic medalist. But if both are unlucky enough to be caught in a riptide, both will be equally and inevitably carried out to sea.