Maya Lin: existing between boundaries
Having met and interviewed renowned designer, artist, architect and environmentalist Maya Lin, writer Steven Knipp revisits some of her landmark achievements and catches up with what’s happening in her work right now.
© WBUR Boston licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 // AP Photo/Jackie Johnston
At 21, a shy university student found herself catapulted, literally overnight, from obscurity to international fame. The year was 1982, and the deep emotional wounds of the Vietnam War were still raw in the hearts and minds of millions of Americans.
Maya Lin was a senior studying architecture at Yale when a classmate told her about a nationwide design competition to create a memorial in Washington, D.C. honouring the Americans who gave their lives or remained missing in Vietnam. To ensure a fair contest, bids were blind: numbered, with no names used.
When the all-male panel of eight judges selected the work of a complete unknown, Lin had bested 1,420 entries—including those by the finest design firms in the United States and acclaimed architects three times her age.
Lin’s design was unlike any other war memorial. No bronze heroes on rearing horses. No cannons. No flying flags.
Original competition submission // Maya Lin / Library of Congress / Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund Collection [ADE - UNIT 2228, no. 1 (L) & no. 2 (R) (E size) [P&P]
Her concept was starkly simple, yet astonishingly powerful in its emotional impact. Two austere polished black granite walls, each 75 metres long, rising out of the grass of the National Mall. Inscribed on the wall panels would be the names of over 58,000 Americans who served in Vietnam, including eight women service members who had died in the course of that conflict.
Though initial public reaction was positive, critics began to protest the selection. An increasingly vocal cabal of powerful conservative businessmen and politicians disdained everything about the design, claiming that Lin’s concept wasn’t patriotic enough: demanding a more traditional choice, they pushed for Congress to hold hearings which then took place over several months.
Twilight at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial // U.S. Department of Defense
But Lin, whose parents fled China just before Mao took power and went on to become educators at Ohio University—her father a ceramicist and dean of the College of Fine Arts; her mother a poet, literature professor and sole member of the Asian Studies department—stood strong, with a patience and composure far beyond her years.
In testimony before the Congressional hearings, she calmly explained her design goal was never to promote the military, or defend a war. It was to remember thousands of shattered lives and help heal broken families. After the Wall’s dedication, one mother wrote to Lin relating how she burst into tears when she found her son’s name was at the right height to kiss.
Today, 40 years on, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial is the single most visited place in the American capital. Dramatically flood-lit after dark, it’s seen by five million people each year.
Civil Rights Memorial // Carol M. Highsmith's America / Library of Congress [LC-DIG-highsm-04786]
There were some who believed Maya Lin’s debut achievement was a mere fluke. Especially after she quietly returned to Yale to complete her undergraduate degree, and subsequently got her architect’s license. Lin then set up her own small studio in New York City and went on to produce a string of remarkable creations.
These included a Civil Rights Memorial for the Southern Poverty Law Center in Alabama, a tribute to those who died in the American civil rights struggle between 1954 and 1968. The acclaimed memorial is a simple 12 by 3 metre granite table placed in front of a Biblical paraphrase used by slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr—“We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream”—over which a steady stream of water flows.
Edward Ashworth, the Center’s board member who commissioned Lin, recalls: “On dedication day, the first visitors to see the memorial, adults and children, immediately put their hands in the cool water. Their tears dropping and mingling with the water on the table—it was just unbelievably emotional.”
Civil Rights Memorial // Carol M. Highsmith's America / Library of Congress [LC-DIG-highsm-04439]
Many of her most celebrated designs incorporate running water and natural landscapes. As a girl growing up in bucolic Athens, Ohio, Lin spent endless hours exploring the woods and rolling hills near her home, becoming an environmentalist long before it was fashionable. And she has long been committed to using sustainable materials and creating buildings that aren’t too big, “because I like utilizing outdoor rooms.”
Discussing her meticulous work process, Lin, who speaks with a deep voice belying her compact size says, “My work is heavily researched. But then you have to kill off that side of you to find the poetry within the thought. Once I have visited a site and have a sense of where I want to begin to work, I start sculpting in clay at a small scale.” In her book Boundaries, she writes “I see myself existing between boundaries, a place where opposites meet; science and art, art and architecture, East and West. My work originates from a simple desire to make people aware of their surroundings.”
Two of Lin’s most compelling environmental works include The Wave Field series and Ghost Forest. Using aerial photography and topographic mapping, she made a three-month study of fluid dynamics, aerodynamics and turbulence, before moulding a 930 square metre field of grass at the University of Michigan into what appears to be a series of gentle waves. The effect is so calming, viewers can almost feel the ocean breezes. Two further Wave Field projects followed: the dune-like Flutter in Miami, Florida and an undulating 11-acre sea of grass at Storm King Art Center in upstate New York.
For her haunting Ghost Forest, Lin retrieved a towering grove of 49 dying Atlantic white cedar trees scheduled for clearance and re-sited them inside a public park in Midtown Manhattan—a disturbing vision few city dwellers ever expect to encounter. Part of the expansive What is Missing? project, it’s a dire warning about the devastation of climate change.
Certainly, What is Missing? is Maya Lin’s most ambitious environmental venture. The designer, recently widowed and the mother of two college-aged daughters, calls it “my fifth and last memorial.” A collaboration between art and science, the project encompasses a series of permanent sculptures, media exhibitions and also a presence in the virtual world at the immersive whatismissing.org website.
Her goal, Lin says, is “to focus attention on species and places that have gone extinct or will most likely disappear within our lifetime if we do not act to protect them.”
“I have known for almost twenty years that I would end the Memorial series with a memorial focused on the environment. Ever since I was a child, the ability of one species, mankind, to alter so drastically life on the entire planet has weighed heavily on my thoughts. I cannot think of a greater threat to us and to every other species on this planet than the current crisis we are facing today concerning species and habitat loss and the threat of human-induced climate change.”
Ghost Forest // Maya Lin Studio
For Lin, this is the ultimate reimagining of a what a memorial can be; not a fixed static monument, but a work that exists in several mediums and in multiple places simultaneously.
“The website takes me to the final dematerialization of the form of a monument. From my first Memorial, which I have never seen as an object but rather a pure surface with the names becoming the object, a mirror that gave us darkly a separation between our world; and now the surface of a screen that each person explores privately yet one shares and explores and contributes a memory so that you become a part of this growing online collective memorial. And whose goal is to not just make us aware of these losses but to give us direction and hope for what can be done to help.”