Zillionaire who’s never made a sandwich, let alone cooked a meal in its life designs screaming insanity-causing kitchens for hapless students. Film at eleven.
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I don’t think anything single thing that tries to tell the story of Pruitt-Igoe captures it, because most of the failing are so embedded in the broader system. Things that tell the story of Pruitt-Igoe or Cabrini Green or Outhwaite tend to get too caught up in architectural determinism. There’s an old EPI article that is a really good start, because it carries a bunch of the background on residential segregation, slum clearance, and public housing in St. Louis, including both national policy concerns and local specifics. Everything up through section 4 is relevant, but 5 and 6 are just worth reading.
Outside of that I think a look at the major laws, or at least their Wikipedia articles is a good next step.
The housing act of '37 and the USHA it created, specifically the requirement for an income gap it required between the bottom of the housing market and the top of public housing incomes.
You also want the housing acts of '49 and '54.
When you piece them together the quick idea is that we created a system that only accepted the absolute lowest incomes. This often required social disruption because neighborhoods were destroyed and families would have to break up to clear income and work requirements. Once in these buildings we required that the rents of those, by definition, lowest income individuals had to cover all maintenance. We then required lowest cost construction, rather than a focus on durability or livability. Once we did that we built high rise towers that were lower construction cost, but extraordinarily high maintenance costs. This led to a rapid decline and all of the social ills that come with massive unsupported poverty. We built a nightmare machine.
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I guess he assumes the cleaning will happen magically, too, since it does at his house(s). I doubt he has any idea just how much constant cleaning is needed for a kitchen that cooks for 64 people.
I continue to be baffled by the kitchens. Is the school going to provide institutional sized cookware? And complete place settings and tumblers for 64 people? Plus industrial dishwashers? And consumables? And give classes in how to cook for large groups? And how to manage a kitchen, including budgeting, accounting, scheduling, menu planning, predicting attendance, ordering supplies - and how is the kitchen garbage going to go out? Are there going to be kitchen totter grease stains through the dorm hallways? Just, ugh…
Or does he expect the students will cook individually in these? Where are they going to leave all of their personal cookware, food and supplies so that they won’t be taken?
/Rant
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The follow-up question is: how many full-time maids and cooks is he expecting will need to use the same 2 entrances/exits every day to do the work?
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An excellent, well-expressed and -thought-out rant of wisdom.
You are hereby and herewith granted all my bitchen 90s rant smileys.
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Oof.
I’ve stayed in a hotel that has both normal and ‘internal’ rooms.
It was okay for a few days, but it was a very strange experience with the room being either fully lit or in complete darkness with nothing inbetween. It was a genuine concern that if my alarm didn’t go off i’d have no clue when i’d get up 
As a hotel room, no windows was okay, but i couldn’t bear living in one permanently.
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I went of a cruise and my husband and I had one of the interior rooms, with no windows. It was near pitch black with the lights off. It was so odd to wake up and wonder if it was 2am or perhaps 7am or even 10am. Some people turned the TV on to the live feed from the bow of the ship so when then the sun rose the TV would light up.
It was fine for 2 weeks on holiday. But it would be murder as a student.
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Feel free to build one. With your own money.
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…and live in it yrself.
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Every architect should be legally obligated to live/work for a while in any house they design.
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I have made a similar statement ever since living in a townhouse cluster that was designed by two award-winning (you’ve heard of them) architects:
Every year, architectural schools need to hold a symposium in which they bring people who have had to work and/or live in buildings designed by famous architects, to tell the students what the reality is actually like.
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Some of the turns of phrase in this article are 
The problem with this argument – let’s address housing need by making dwellings ever more miserably confined – is that it knows no bottom. Perhaps in the future students can be cryogenically frozen at night, then efficiently stacked using the storage and retrieval systems of an Amazon distribution centre, before being defrosted in time for their morning slurp of laboratory-made food substitute. But we don’t have to go that far to see what a shrivelled vision of humanity it is that gives no value to sunlight or to the rhythms of night and day and where this approach is willingly accepted by a university seemingly because it comes with a large dollop of cash.
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The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his client to plant vines.
— Frank Lloyd Wright
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There is an Australian comedy TV series called Upper Middle Bogan, where one of the characters (the husband of the main protagonist) is an architect.
There is a running joke in later seasons that he and his family move into a house which he had designed. He spends a lot of time trying to convince everyone how good it is. “Everyone” includes himself.
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