There was a need to honor the soldiers who had gone to Vietnam and there was a flourishing contemporary art movement, known as land art, that supplied the formal language for the piece that Lin designed. For a miracle, there is no explanation, and, except for one element, the Vietnam Memorial is explicable. Still, beating the odds is not the same as a miracle. When art and politics collide, it is usually the art that gets totaled that time, against all the odds, it didn’t. “I think it is actually a miracle that the piece ever got built,” Lin wrote about the memorial in Boundaries. She hates Washington, and has rarely been back since her work was finished. “It was beyond miserable.” There is still indignation in her voice when she gets on the subject of the building of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Model of Simplicity.“It was miserable,” Lin said when I first asked her about her year in Washington. The Nation (August 31, 1985: 153)įorgey, Benjamin. And I started writing about my design while still in his class I hand wrote that essay directly onto the competition boards (you can still see typos) and sent in the project. I realized how close the experience he described was to my design for the Vietnam memorial-though formally they couldn’t have been more different. In his description he talked about it as a journey towards an awareness of loss.

I wanted to honestly present that time and reflect upon our relationship to war and to loss.Ĭoincidentally a few weeks before I submitted the design one of my professors, Vincent Scully, in a seminar I was taking, described one of the World War I memorials I had previously studied, Lutyen’s Memorial to the Missing of the Somme at Thiepval. The semester ended and I decided to enter the design in the actual competition that spring, not because I had any thought it could win, but because I wanted to say something about making this memorial personal, human, and focused on the individual experience. The memorial’s sighting is directly related to the presence of both the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument, tying the three together physically and historically. I wanted the memorial to create a private and personal connection with each viewer to those names. A veteran can find his or her own time on the wall, and all visitors would be able to see themselves reflected in the names. At the apex where the two walls join, the dates 19 (marking the beginning and end of the war) “meet,” thus closing the circle of the time span of the war. My design evolved into two black granite walls, placed below grade, engraved in chronological order with the names of the men and women who gave their lives in the Vietnam War. We had also just received the guidelines for the competition which stipulated that the names of all those killed be listed, and that the memorial be apolitical and contemplative in nature. I imagined cutting into the earth and polishing its open sides, like a geode. over Thanksgiving break, I had an impulse to cut open the earth. I was struck by how emotionally powerful they were and I knew that I wanted to create a work that would focus as well on the individuals. The use of identification tags had not yet been introduced and with the onset of modern warfare, there was no way to recognize and identify so many of the soldiers, so many of the monuments were erected to the missing, with all the names of those killed listed. Those monuments were created, listing all the names of soldiers lost in the battles. In researching for the WWIII assignment, I had noticed how war memorials often focused on the victor, rather than on the individual soldiers’ lives, until the memorials to World War I in Europe.

One of my classmates had seen a poster for a competition for the design of a Vietnam Veteran’s memorial, and since we had just completed an assignment for the design of a memorial to World War III, we chose to end the class with this project. Photography: Terry Adams, Mark Segal, Victoria Sambunaris, Wendy Watriss

Architect of Record: Cooper-Lecky Partnership

Maya lin drawings