Public Housing Saint Louis Mo

Postmodern nature and artifice

Pruitt-Igoe was a public housing scheme designed by American-Japanese architect Minoru Yamasaki, who also designed New York’s ill-starred Twin Towers. Pruitt-Igoe had conspicuously failed and was demolished, in one of the first indictments of modernism for the masses. Jencks, probably the most influential architectural writer of our time, later admitted he had no idea of the exact hour at which the blocks were demolished. But it sounded better to ascribe a precise time to the death of modernism.

And that became its formal demise, quoted ever since. In its place came “postmodernism”, which Jencks was the first to define and name: the end of a prescribed style in architecture and the beginning of a new “anything-goes” era of pluralism. He was one of the first to declare that “We are all postmodern now.”

In the past three decades Jencks has become a landscape architect of note, as well as a theorist, setting out to interpret our contemporary understanding of science and the cosmos through the medium of vast natural sculptures that he calls “landforms”. These are complex earthworks – mounds, ziggurats, swirling hillocks, lakes and paths – that create a sculpted landscape of real strangeness and power.

The newest of these is at Jupiter Artland, a landscape of art and artifice on the estate of Bonnington House just outside Edinburgh. Established by Robert and Nicky Wilson, a couple who made their money in homeopathy, Jupiter Artland is a sprawling landscape inhabited by some classy site-specific sculptures and installations including pieces by Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley, Cornelia Parker, Nathan Coley and Andy Goldsworthy. The latter’s solid stone building with a floor of exposed bedrock is particularly haunting: architecture as container for landscape.

The Artland tag was suggested by Jencks. “I’d been to Stourhead,” he tells me as we stroll round the grounds in a persistent Scottish drizzle, “and was inspired by the perfect parity between architecture and art, in fact the architecture is the art. I wrote a piece called ‘Not Sculpture Park’, because most of these things become car parks for bought-in sculpture. The artists should be working with the site, not just plonking pieces down.”

Tall and patrician, with an easy charm, Jencks switches from art to philosophy, particle physics to architecture, as easily as he strides across the landscape in his green gumboots. His contribution to Artland is an undulating landscape of swelling waves and curves that represent the division of cells. “The cell is a city of production centres,” Jencks says, “each part working away like mad, and it’s co-ordinated. Six trillion cells in a body – you can’t help but be moved.

Who should grade the teachers? - The Public Insight Network

Everyone knows that teachers grade their students. But who should grade the teachers — and how?

The question is at the heart of a lot of education talk these days, and not only in schools.

In Washington, Congress is continuing to struggle with what should follow the No Child Left Behind program, whose reliance on standardized exams has been debated almost from the day the first test answer was bubbled in. In Jefferson City, education officials are trying for the third time to come up with new standards to judge schools and districts across the state.

“I’m not aware that there is one teacher evaluation system that is the gold standard,” said Michael Podgursky, an economist at the University of Missouri at Columbia who has conducted research into teacher quality. “I don’t think it exists, and I think it would be hard to come up with one. There are pieces you might use in different contexts, but we’re not there yet. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be evaluating teachers. That’s the important thing.

“Talk to the band teacher, and say how would I know if you are doing a good job. What are you trying to accomplish. What are indicators of being a good band teacher? Then you measure that stuff and keep track of it. I think schools are paying a lot more attention to it now.

“There is always a market in K-12 education for someone to come along and say this is it, this is THE teacher evaluation system. You’ve got to be skeptical. Good managers will roll up their sleeves and grow their own.”

Growing its own is what Missouri education officials have tried to do with newly adopted standards that teachers are expected to meet. The list of nine standards, broken down into 36 separate indicators of teacher quality, have a lofty goal: to indicate that “effective teachers are caring, reflective practitioners and life-long learners who continuously acquire new knowledge and skills and are constantly seeking to improve their teaching practice to provide high academic achievement for all students.”

But what does that mean to the women and men who stand in front of the classroom every day or the administrators who have to evaluate them or the students who have to learn from them or the parents and other taxpayers who want to make sure they are getting the most for their education dollar?

Does it mean using test scores to measure how well students have learned? Does it mean observing teachers in the classroom to see how well they get their lessons across? Does it mean asking students or parents or peers to get the opinions of the people who may know them best?

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