Notes for Discussion - Maya Lin
Born
in 1959 in Athens, Ohio, Maya Lin catapulted into the public eye when,
as a senior at Yale University, she submitted the winning design in
a national competition for a Vietnam Veterans Memorial to be built
in Washington, D.C. She was trained as an artist and architect, and
her sculptures, parks, monuments, and architectural projects are linked
by her ideal of making a place for individuals within the landscape.
Lin, a Chinese-American, came from a cultivated and artistic home.
Her father was the dean of fine arts at Ohio University; her mother
is a professor of literature at Ohio University. “As the child
of immigrants you have that sense of, Where are you? Where’s
home? And trying to make a home,” remarks Lin. She draws inspiration
for her sculpture and architecture from culturally diverse sources,
including Japanese gardens, Hopewell Indian earthen mounds, and works
by American earthworks artists of the 1960s and 1970s. Her most recognizable
work, the "Vietnam Veterans Memorial," allows the names of
those lost in combat to speak for themselves, connecting a tragedy
that happened on foreign soil with the soil of America’s capital
city, where it stands. Lin lives in New York and Colorado.
The Vietnam
Veterans Memorial (1982)
National Mall, Washington, DC
"I also wanted remembering the past relevant to the present. Some people wanted me to put the names in alphabetical order. I wanted them in chronological order so that a veteran could find his time within the panel. It's like a thread of life."
"As
you descend the path along the wall and reach this angle, you realize
that one wing of the black wall points straight at the tall, white
Washington Monument a mile or so off, and the other at the Lincoln
Memorial, visible through a screen of trees about 600 feet away. In
making this descent you feel you're entering a cloistered space, set
off from the busy surroundings. Streets and skylines disappear to leave
you alone with the wall and its names. Then, as you pass the angle
and begin to climb, you feel yourself emerging again into the world
of noise and light after a meditative experience.
" At close range, the names dominate everything. . . . The name of the first soldier who died is carved at the angle in the wall, and the names continue to the right in columns in chronological order of date of death, out to the east end where the wall fades into the earth. The names begin again, with the next soldier who died, at the west end, where the wall emerges from the earth...."
Robert Campbell, "An Emotive Place Apart," A.I.A. Journal, May 1983, pp. 150-1
Maya Lin
" . . . this memorial is for those who have died, and for us to remember."
" It was while I was at the site that I designed it. I just sort of visualized it. It just popped into my head. Some people were playing Frisbee. It was a beautiful park. I didn't want to destroy a living park. You use the landscape. You don't fight with it. You absorb the landscape . . . When I looked at the site I just knew I wanted something horizontal that took you in, that made you feel safe within the park, yet at the same time reminding you of the dead. So I just imagined opening up the earth. . . ."
Maya Lin in an interview with Washington Post writer Phil McCombs in Brent Ashabranner and Photographs by Jennifer Ashabranner. Always to Remember, the Story of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, p. 42.
" I though about what death is, what a loss is. A sharp pain that lessens
with time, but can never quite heal over. A scar. The idea occurred to
me there on the site. Take a knife and cut open the earth, and with time
the grass would heal it. As if you cut open the rock and polished it."
" Andy (Maya Lin's Yale critic) said, you have to make the angle mean something. And I wanted the names in chronological order because to hone the living as well as the dead it had to be a sequence in time."
Maya Lin, quoted in Robert Campbell, "An Emotive Place Apart," A.I.A. Journal, May 1983, p. 151.