Street Art

Seattle's street art often takes me by surprise -- by its skill, its unexpectedness, and its subversive humor. Murals and graffiti can be found in most urban centers, but each city has its own vibe when it comes to the spray-painting of art or aggression in public places. Seattle's, I think, is particularly creative. Here's a showcase of some walls I like in the U-District, Fremont and Capitol Hill. [Note -- a couple details that are hard to see: in the first photo, the object at the center blasting out green noise is a stereo; in the final one, the posters read "Find the Unexpected", advertising the Seattle International Film Festival.]

The Necklace of Cranes

Just across the bridge from where I live there's a pocket-handkerchief of a park with a bronze statue of a girl holding an origami crane. Imagine my surprise when, one spring morning, I discovered that a necklace of rainbow-colored origami cranes had appeared, as if from nowhere, draped over the girl's outstretched arm. The next morning there was another, and then another, and by the end of the summer the statue could scarcely be seen for all the ribbons of cranes.

I didn't discover the story until the next year. When the cranes that had disappeared over the winter began silently to appear again in the spring, I looked up the park to find an explanation. It's called the Peace Park, and the girl is Sadako Sasaki, who died of leukemia aged 12, 10 years after the atomic bomb fell on her home town of Hiroshima.

The story goes that Sadako's best friend Chizuko was visiting her five months after she was hospitalized, and folded a crane for her out of a piece of gold paper, reminding her that if she folded one thousand cranes she would be granted a wish. Sadako was inspired, and began folding cranes, using anything from wrapping paper to medicine packages. Accounts differ as to whether she reached her thousand cranes, but when she died three months later her classmates decided that the story and the garlands of cranes would not end there.

They started a movement to raise money to build a monument for Sadako and the other children that had died from exposure to the atom bomb, and three years later a statue of her holding a golden crane was unveiled in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial in Japan. In 1990, 45 years after the bombing, this statue was dedicated in Seattle. Both memorials continue to this day to be covered with thousands of folded cranes, each one with a prayer for peace, and an end to nuclear warfare.

Post-Industrial Glamour

Seattle’s wealth of coffeeshops should come as no surprise to the casual visitor. But if you expect to find the slick styling of Starbucks at the independent cafes you will be taken aback. The predominant style is one of unfinished renovation from a recent industrial past: brickwork is exposed, metal joists and ducts crisscross the ceiling, large joints latch beams together at corners. Just as designs at the latest Christian Dior collection in Paris had their outer layers of fabric ripped away to reveal the cobweb structure of bodice or puffed skirt, so here interior walls are stripped back to show the structural gridwork that sustains them.

Solstice in the U-District, Zeitgeist at Pioneer Square and Espresso Vivace on Capitol Hill are among the many cafes that show this style. Clothing store Urban Outfitters takes a similar approach. Window displays have planks nailed across chipboard as a backdrop; lights are suspended from the system of bars underhanging the ceiling.

This inside-out architecture is tinkering with an idea that the Pompidou Center in Paris took full out in 1977. This building’s exoskeleton of steel bars, tubes and mechanical systems is given cartoon style by being brightly colorcoded in primary colors (red for safety devices, blue for temperature, yellow for electrical wires). The result is playful, a defamiliarizing postmodern joke that’s as tongue-in-cheek as it is disturbing.

The problem is that although superbly clever, the Pompidou Center is not an inviting or liveable kind of space. Seattle’s cafes do not try to deconstruct the fabric of reality, which makes them a lot more comfortable to frequent. Their aim, like that of the Dior collection, is an engagement with what’s behind a polished, apparently effortless show. A post-industrial structure may sound like the opposite of glamour, but this coffeeshop exposure of structure and mechanics is (again, like Dior) a very long way from being artless.

Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first World's Fair held in Seattle: the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. The fair was held just 12 years after the Klondike Gold Rush, which had set Seattle on the road to riches, and it billed the Pacific Northwest as the gateway both to the oriental splendors of China and Japan, and to the new-found gold fields of Alaska and the Yukon territory in Canada. It was a wild success: over the course of its four-and-a-half month duration this trade-show-cum-fairground attracted 3.7 million visitors.

Exhibits ranged from the sublime to the ridiculous. Buildings were designed in the neoclassical style, with a stunning "white city" (pictured) at the heart of the fair. Meanwhile, the Agriculture Building proudly advertised the "first display of clams ever shown at an exposition," and The Seattle Daily Times praised the Hawaii Building for "a pine-apple 30 feet high composed of small pineapples cunningly arranged." Rather more impressively, the Alaska Building featured one million dollars-worth of gold, as dust, nuggets and ingots.

The must-see area for thrill-seekers was Pay Streak, where visitors could see loinclothed dancing Igorrotes from the Philippines, multi-tiered Asian teahouses, and a structure roughly resembling Shakespeare's Globe offering regular reenactments of the Battle of Gettysburg. In a similar vein, there was a reenactment of the Boston Tea Party on Lake Union, complete with dramatic shelling of a specially built replica of the Gaspee. The combination of patriotic fervor, Pacific Northwest pride and exotic voyeurism was a sure-fire hit.

What is surprising, given the solid and imposing nature of the buildings of the white city, is that they were built just as temporary structures. The soaring domes and intricate cornices comprised little more than plasterwork. The goal, after all, was not to beat the Old World at its own game, but simply to prove that Seattle could be as neoclassical as Bath, should it so wish. Having made this point, the buildings were promptly dismantled, and today there is no trace of their existence. The one World's Fair structure that does still hold pride of place in Seattle dates from 1962, and owes no debt whatsoever to the Greeks: this is, of course, the iconic Space Needle.

Seven Bottles of Light in a Stone Box

The chapel of St. Ignatius, on the campus of Seattle University, is an unexpectedly beautiful sanctuary and place of worship. It was designed by architect Steven Holl, using as its guiding concept the gathering of different lights together, in reference to St. Ignatius' understanding of the spiritual life as comprising many internal lights and darknesses. Holl described the design as "seven bottles of light in a stone box."

The bottles of light were a success: the chapel won an award from the American Institute of Architects in 1998, and a scale model of the chapel was chosen for inclusion in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. More importantly, the chapel is the perfect place for quiet reflection -- a key element in the layout of Seattle University, which is a Jesuit college.

Entering the chapel, you are greeted by a set of five icons, painted on commission by Dora Nikolova Bittau, an artist in Rome. Their glow is balanced on the opposite side of the entryway by four windows whose clear glass has been turned into semi-abstract narrative art. Glasswork is perhaps the Northwest's most lauded artistic work, but these windows take a more subtle approach than the swirling kaleidoscopes of color that regional superstar Dale Chihuly creates.

Color is provided, in this otherwise white interior, by colored glass lenses in the highest windows, and suspended baffles, painted just on the side that outside light will fall. The result is delicate, in keeping with effects such as the prayers embedded into the walls of the small room with the Madrona tree, in gold leaf on beeswax. The balance of Byzantine richness and modern simplicity is beguiling: sacred space was never calmer or more beautiful than this.

American Beauty

America has always had a different approach to progress than her progenitors across the Atlantic. While we in England in the 1920s were spending civilized weekends at the National Trust, Ezra Pound was shocking the world by proclaiming "Make it New." In the 1870s, Alfred Lord Tennyson was turning to medieval romances and the Classics for inspiration, while Walt Whitman was singing odes to progress and industry. In his Song of the Exposition he writes:

"Here shall you trace in flowing operation,
In every state of practical, busy movement, the rills of civilization...
You shall see the crude ores of California and Nevada passing on and on till they become bullion...
You shall mark in amazement the Hoe press whirling its cylinders, shedding the printed leaves steady and fast,
The photograph, model, watch, pin, nail, shall be created before you."

Whitman's love of the mechanical, the leaves of print as much as the leaves of grass, puts him in a position of sympathy with Thomas Eakins -- and in fact the two were friends. Eakins was trained in the clear-eyed accuracy of mechanical and anatomical drawing, and his 1871 painting of the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia, entitled Max Schmitt in a Single Scull, shows the influence of this realist approach. The architectural detail of the Girard Avenue Bridge and Connecting Railroad Bridge in the background is flawless, the reflections exact, the rowers neatly precise.

The result, despite being in stark contrast to the contemporaneous Impressionist movement, is beautiful: the sheer functionalism of the sculls and bridges gives them elegance. It's a particularly American aesthetic, and one that is just as applicable to Seattle's bridge-spanned waterways. Indeed, as Seattle author Bernice S. Moore wrote in 1947, at the height of the Northwest Arts and Crafts movement (with perhaps a very slight excess of enthusiasm), "One may get the same feeling of beauty from the smooth streamlines of an airplane or an electric iron that one may get from a beautiful piece of sculpture."

A Selection of Statues

Lenin
In Fremont, the time-honored practice of erecting a statue to commemorate a historical event or honorable person is turned upside down. The 16-foot-tall and seven-ton bronze statue of Lenin is a case in point: part accident, part experiment, part provocation. The sculptor was Emil Venkov, who labored over it for ten years, and the statue was installed in Poprad, in present-day Slovakia, in 1988.

After the Velvet Revolution of 1989 the statue was quietly taken down, and was due to be melted for its bronze when it was discovered by Lewis E. Carpenter, a Washington native who was teaching English in Poprad. Recognising its artistic value, he remortgaged his house and bought it, and shipped it back to the States -- much to the consternation of the Seattle community. There was then an unexpected twist: In the midst of all the uproar, Carpenter was killed in a car crash.

The statue was left lying in his backyard, and his family have been trying to get rid of it ever since. They got it off their property and set up in Fremont in 1995, and it is currently for sale for $250,000, proceeds to go to the Fremont Chamber of Commerce for community art projects. In the meantime, its controversy is a source of glee for the community, which alternates between promoting it as Art, and dressing it up as John Lennon.

Troll
Familiar to us all from Scandinavian folklore, the myth of the troll has been made quite literally concrete underneath the Aurora Bridge. The two-ton creature squats in the darkness, single hub-cap eye gleaming, and crushing a Volkswagon Beetle -- with a California license plate -- in its left hand. It was created by a team of four local artists in 1990, with the aim of rehabilitating the space. Today, instead of a dark corner for dumping tyres and dealing drugs, it is a tourist attraction. The moral, we must assume, is bring on the trolls.

Dinosaur
What more could Fremont want? Well, a true-to-scale topiary model of an apatosaurus was a notable absence until 2000, when the Pacific Science Center serendipitously decided to sell its pair of ivy-clad dinosaurs for the bargain price of $1. They were relocated to the edge of the Ship Canal, where they forage happily today just as they did 150 million years ago.