Deconstructing the Ziff - Part 2

Inside/Outside, Right/Left or Behind the Lines

This is part 2 of the blog. Please click here for Part 1

You can just see a little PEEP of the passage in Looking-glass House, if you leave the door of our drawing-room wide open: and it's very like our passage as far as you can see, only you know it may be quite different beyond. Oh, Kitty! how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! (Lewis Carroll Through the Looking-Glass)

In the above photo of the Marjorie and Arnold Ziff building at the University of Leeds, you can see a reflection of another building in the sheath-like glass fascia. This is the Michael Sadler building next to it, a building from another period and made of Portland Stone on this side. Portland Stone was used a lot in civic buildings for a few hundred years until the 20th century. As a material it makes a statement about public life and civic pride. Not only can we often see it in buildings belonging to royalty, such as Buckingham Palace, but also in our Town Halls. So when we pass this side of the Ziff building we can see the Michael Sadler building doubled, in both its real self on one side of us, and it's reflection on the other side. This reminds us that while the University of Leeds is a contemporary university (we have, and can afford, a brand new postmodern building like 'the Ziff'), it also has historic civic origins which add gravitas to the perception of it as an established university. This is what the university said about the Ziff building in a press release at the point the building work was planned:

The Marjorie and Arnold Ziff building [...]will present a world-class face to the community it serves - the University's past, present and future students, its partners and the region. The building will also represent, more visibly than any other project, the ambitious plan for Leeds to rank among the world's top 50 universities by 2015. (University of Leeds 2006)

While the mirror-like quality of glass has the effect of opening up space - the Ziff building fits snugly into what was a relatively small 'vacant plot' - it also reflects the university back onto itself in the same way the Westin Bonaventure does with LA. The Ziff building presents both a "word class face" yet also, in the same moment, reaffirms its past.



Reinhold Martin explains the effects of this mirroring quality which is so prevalent in postmodern architecture. He describes it as forming "feedback loops" which constantly repeats binary structures such as: "inside outside inside outside", "vertical horizontal vertical horizontal" or "right left right left". (2010: 106) The effects of this may be more apparent in a photograph of the other side of the Ziff building (see above). This side of the building is a wall of curved glass and steel. The mesh-like steel decoration, while part of the building, is also reflected in the building itself. So the steel appears twice, creating the lines of the complex matrix you can see here.

Here we not only see the surrounding area reflected in the face of the building, but also the steel embellishment reflected in the building too; the building also reflects itself. Martin says that these mirrored architectural styles are "less oppositional or complementary than they are redundant, a doubling back of the surface onto itself". (ibid.) He goes on to say that the mirror is a function belonging to postmodernism as it appears as late capitalism, agreeing with both David Harvey and Fredric Jameson's dialectical critiques of how capital operates in urban space. Martin says this occurs at the "point at which what is culture and what is capital cannot be distinguished in any useful way." (ibid.)

This is apparent in the reaffirmation of the university's current strapline in their press release above about the Ziff building: "The building will also represent, more visibly than any other project, the ambitious plan for Leeds to rank among the world's top 50 universities by 2015". As Martin explains, architecture "appears as a cipher in which is encoded a virtual universe of production and consumption, as well as a material unit, a piece of that universe that helps to keep it going." (Martin 2010: xi)



This becomes an interesting point when it comes to postmodern artworks such as Anish Kapoor's mirrored public sculptures, for example his 2010 artwork Turning the World Upside Down and, especially, Cloud Gate (2006) (above) which reflects Chicago back onto itself. The $23 million it cost to fund Cloud Gate, came from donations from individuals and corporations.

Bibliography:
Jameson, Fredriç. 2009. Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso).
Martin, Reinhold. 2010. Utopia's Ghost: Architecture and Postmodernism, Again (London: Profile Books).
University of Leeds. 'Marjorie and Arnold Ziff Building', The Reporter (27 November 2006), [accessed 5 November 2012]

Deconstructing the Ziff - Part 1

Up, Down and Around or The Chamber of 32 Doors

"There were doors all 'round the hall, but they were all locked; and when Alice had been all the way down one side and up the other, trying every door, she walked sadly down the middle, wondering how she was ever to get out again." (Lewis Carroll Alice in Wonderland)

On the University of Leeds campus we often find new buildings 'shoe-horned' into small 'leftover' spaces, much like the Marjorie and Arnold Ziff building which was opened for business in January 2009 and operates as an administration centre, primarily for students. The building appears squeezed in between the end of a Victorian terrace and one of the lecture blocks, the Michael Sadler Building.

This recent building has the effect of drawing attention to the buildings either side of it if you make an effort to look, but despite these architectural differences urban space operates such that it naturalises the very space that it forms, hiding those differences. Postmodern space is hugely complex because of the history on which it sits; yet there is a type of homogeneity also operating which smooths that space and presents it to the viewer like it has been that way 'forever'.

This is one of postmodernism's paradoxes well noted by Fredriç Jameson. He explains how the notion of a dialectic opposition is not something that appears in the analysis of postmodern society in the same way that it did in a more modernist or Marxist period. (2009: 344) He goes on to say that the cultural objects considered under postmodernism often seem to "fold back into each other". (ibid.) This is apparent when viewing postmodern space, especially in the examples Jameson offers, such as the Westin Bonaventure building consisting of four mirrored columns which simply reflect Los Angeles back to itself.



While it would not be possible to describe the Marjorie and Arnold Ziff building with the same intensity that Jameson describes the Westin Bonaventure - it is not exactly a postmodern hyperspace - it does share some of its qualities, to varying degrees. There are two entrances to the Ziff building. The main one is obvious and is the one that you would first come to if you were encountering the campus from the main university entrance. Here you are taken in to the queueing area that students who require administrative assistance would use. There is also a staircase straight ahead that takes you up to the café on the floor above, which once you are a few feet into the foyer, you can see opening up at the top of the stairs and overlooking the administration area. However, from the other end of the building there is a much smaller, less obvious entrance which takes you on to a level which is between these two floors, requiring you go down a few steps to enter the student admin area, and up a few steps to enter the café. This is slightly disorienting if you have previously only ever entered the main entrance before, as you are not necessarily aware of the slight incline on which the building is built, even if you regularly walk that slight uphill path on your way elsewhere. The image below shows almost the full length of the building on that side, which is not a great distance. However, it is enough to mean this smaller entrance cannot take you directly onto the ground floor of the building inside.



Once just inside this other entrance, while you can work out where the administration area is in space (it is still visible from outside these windows you see in the image above), the café has suddenly disappeared from view. It is closed in at this end of the building and it requires a moment for you to realise that you are entering the building on a different level, and that since there is only one staircase that goes up, it must be that direction you need to take. This disoriented moment is fleeting, but nevertheless is a common side-effect of postmodern buildings, an example of which was recently expressed to me by a friend attempting to orient herself in the newly opened shopping centre Trinity Leeds, which truly is a postmodern hyperspace.



Part 2 of this blog will look further at the mirroring effect of the glass surface of the Ziff building.

Bibliography: Jameson, Fredriç. 2009. Postmodernism or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London and New York: Verso).