Postcard from Seattle

20 October 2008

Dear Contemporary Urbanist:

Landing in Seattle, I was first struck by the landscape of the Pacific Northwest: the fir trees, the coastline, the hills. Coming in closer to the urban landscape of downtown Seattle and its surrounding neighborhoods, I began to notice something about the freeway off-ramps, underpasses, and industrial buildings. A startling number of these otherwise mundane or grimy spaces were brought to life by urban murals, sculptures, and other artwork.

The bus stop and the freeway or bridge underpass is a part of a city that most people filter out of their everyday consciousness. These are the spaces that are only really noticed by people who do so out of necessity, not out of choice. Even the people who must pass through them are actively tuning out their surroundings, clutching a coffee mug and an iPod at the bus stop or zipping under bridges on bike paths.

Particularly in the North American context, we associate the freeway underpass with the homeless encampment and stigmatize the bus stop because of its use by people who are out of the mainstream of our car culture: the young, the elderly and the poor.

The bus stop and the underpass are necessarily transitory spaces filled with what Mary Douglas would call “matter out of place.” They are overlooked as the armpit of the city, permeated by smells of trash, body odor, and car fumes. In Seattle however, a public arts program has changed the sensory experience of many of these locations.

Seattle has been setting an example with its public art funding since 1973, when it passed a law to set aside one percent of the city’s public construction budget to fund commissions of murals, sculpture, and installation art. In the Fremont neighborhood, the giant concrete troll under the Aurora Bridge is big enough to clutch a Volkswagen bug in his hand. The piece was selected by a vote of the surrounding community and is a Seattle icon.

Elsewhere in the city, murals transform bus shelters and gray freeway underpasses. Installation art distracts the eye from disused lots and storefronts. In the Capitol Hill neighborhood, one such display features a mock furniture store that plays with the theme of fur in picture frames and other living room ephemera in the spirit of Banksy’s New York “pet shop” installation.

Seattle is a city, like New York or east London, with a healthy community of stencil, sticker, and graffiti artists who make the urban landscape just a little bit less drab. Both formal and informal street artwork are assets that can have the ability to make us take a second look at unlikely and otherwise unloved fragments of city life.

E. Mattiuzzi