When the artist Robert Smithson said, "The city gives the illusion that earth does not exist," he was talking about New York, the ultimate concrete jungle. Seattle, in the popular imagination, is another story entirely. A few years ago, Seattle's Convention and Visitors Bureau formalized what has long been the city's reputation, when it took on the slogan "Metronatural™." There's some truth to the stereotype. Seattle's people are gardeners, hikers, and shoppers at REI. Living here, you strike a different pose toward the land. You are assumed to be a recycler. You are assumed to care about the earth, to understand that there is an interconnection between all things.

This is one way in which landscape is political—it shapes its people. It tells them stories about themselves, and plenty of people move to certain places because they want the place's story to be their story. Plenty of people move to Seattle in order to go hiking and kayaking and to grow vegetables. But what I like best about this place is that the nature is all tied up with artifice that you can't actually see. Artists here see it.

In this week's feature about land, art, and urbanness, This Land Is False Land, I find myself noticing the economics of The Lightning Field in New Mexico, resisting descending into a pit of abstraction in the Mormon Mesa in Nevada, and imagining a city park 60 feet in the air in downtown Seattle.

There was only so much I could pack into one story. So I'm going to post other artworks, experiences, and pictures. Yesterday's ghost viewfinders at Alki were one example. Donald Fels, one of the artists who made those, is also working on a project called Waterlines, in conjunction with the Burke Museum.

Fels has some big ideas for land art projects he'd like to see happen while we're in the process of tearing down the viaduct and remaking the waterfront. From an email he sent me:

Occidental Park in Pioneer Square was once mostly a lagoon. A spring fed fresh water into the lagoon and the spring served as the first drinking water source. It would be swell to take up the cobblestones in the park, dig it out and return it to its muddy suggestive self. ...

The Montlake Cut was man-made (by thousands of Chinese laborers, a number of whom didn’t survive the digging). As the Evergreen Bridge gets re-done, why not slice through what was, letting cars drive through the centuries of layers, made visible once again- reengineer the reengineering, cutting through the cut.

And Seattle artist Robin Stein has been preoccupied with regrading for a while. In 2008, shehe co-created the temporary public-art transparency Remains of Hills, documented here. HerHis series of photographs Neighborhood Ziggurats is also about massive construction projects financed by individuals, like Seattle's historic regrades were. (Property owners typically paid 27 cents per cubic yard to have their land regraded.) In herhis photographs, light shines through and around houses that have been lifted off the ground to be raised. The seam between the earth and the building is torn open. All sorts of ideas might start flying out. It reminds me of what was once the Seattle Athletic Club at Fourth and Cherry downtown. Many of the buildings during the regrades were torn down, but some were hoisted up while the earth under them was washed away. Then they'd add new lower floors—the old first floor would become the third or fourth. That's what happened at Fourth and Cherry. Today at that spot there's just a high-rise, but you can imagine the old doubled building.