Nothing led to the disillusion with modern architecture during the postmodern era more than the critique of public housing. It was not, after all, Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (1966) that really ushered in the new style. That book was too complex and subtle. Charles Jencks's more colorful and bombastic The Language of Postmodern Architecture (1977) was much more influential, and it began with a view of the destruction of Pruitt-Igoe. With one facile fell swoop, both modernist form and modernist idealism were imploded.

Oscar Newman's Defensible Space (1972) also played a role. “It is the apartment tower itself which is the real and final villain,” Newman wrote.