Maya Ying Lin

American architect

• Born: October 5, 1959
• Place of Birth: Athens, Ohio

Lin designed the renowned, but also controversial, Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, while she was still an architecture student. Later in her career she designed the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.

Early Life

Maya Ying Lin (mi-uh yihng lihn) was born in Athens, a small town in southern Ohio, on October 5, 1959. Her father, Henry Huan Lin, was a highly respected ceramicist and dean of fine arts at Ohio University. Her mother, Julia C. Lin, was a poet and professor of Asian and English literature. Both of her parents were born to culturally prominent families in China. Lin’s grandfather, Lin Changmin, along with Liang Qichao, whom the author Orville Schell called China’s first democrat, and Xu Zhimo, the greatest Chinese lyric poet of his generation, worked to establish democratic rule in China in the early 1900s. Her grandfather was also the director of the Chinese League of Nations Association and was stationed in London.

While in England, the Lin family socialized with many of the brightest intellectuals of the day, a group that included H. G. Wells, Thomas Hardy, Bertrand Russell, and Katherine Mansfield. Lin Changmin’s daughter, Lin Huiyin (Maya Ying Lin’s aunt), married the son of Liang Qichao, Liang Xucheng. Liang later became China’s greatest architectural historian. After marrying, they moved to the United States, where both received degrees in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. Lin Huiyin then went to Yale University to study architecture and stage design.

The Lins eventually returned to China. Following World War II, however, when Communist forces overtook the Chinese Nationalists in a bitter civil war, Lin’s parents, like many other Chinese, fled the country. Henry left to escape possible death or imprisonment and Julia left to attend Smith College on scholarship. They met for the first time in the United States and later settled in Athens, Ohio.

Lin grew up in a typical middle-class home in a small midwestern university town. Her home environment included art and literature, and she was surrounded by books. An avid reader, she especially liked works by existentialist writer-philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and writer Albert Camus, as well as the fantasies of writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, primarily The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. She learned silversmithing, ceramics, and jewelry design, and she worked for a time at a McDonald’s fast-food restaurant.

Although she was considered a loner at school, Lin was an outstanding student. During her senior year in high school, she was co-valedictorian of her graduating class. When she enrolled at Yale University in 1977, she had not selected a major. Eventually, she chose to enroll in a program in architecture. During her junior year she studied in Europe. While traveling in Europe, she became interested in cemetery architecture. She was particularly moved by Sir Edwin Lutyens’s Thiepval Memorial to the Missing of the Somme, a memorial to the soldiers who died in 1916 during the Somme offensive of World War I. This structure is considered one of the world’s most outstanding war memorials. Lin received her bachelor’s degree in architecture from Yale in 1981 and her master’s degree in architecture from Yale in 1985.

Life’s Work

After Lin returned from Europe for her senior year at Yale, she enrolled in a class in funerary architecture. As a part of her course work, she and her classmates were encouraged to enter a nationwide competition to design a memorial to veterans of the Vietnam War, a memorial to be sited in Washington, DC. The competition, which attracted 1,420 entries, many of them by noted architects and sculptors, was the largest design competition in US history. The entries were judged by a panel of experts, much as the designs for the US Capitol and the Washington Memorial had been.

Lin traveled to Washington with two classmates to view the site of the planned memorial in Constitution Gardens near the Lincoln Memorial. Within a half-hour, she imagined her design. She had seen people gathered in the park and children playing and decided to make a structure that would not destroy the park’s harmony. When she finally completed her sketch for the entry, she was one of the last people to submit her design, five minutes before the deadline. She had made the first model for the wall out of mashed potatoes in the Yale dining facility. One month later, she received a telephone call informing her that she had won the competition.

Lin’s design, like the Vietnam War itself, was controversial. Her design featured a wall consisting of two segments, each 246.75 feet long, that came together to form a V-like structure. One segment of the built memorial points to the Washington Memorial; the other, to the Lincoln Memorial. Each segment consists of seventy polished black granite panels. The names of the soldiers who died in the war, including those missing in action, are inscribed on the panels in the order in which they fell, along with a brief inscription. (At the memorial's completion, there were 58,181 names; by 2011, that number had increased to 58,272.) At the intersection, the highest point, the panels are 10.1 feet high; they taper to a width of eight inches at each end. On the back side, the entire structure is below ground. The front is open so that people can walk by and touch the wall if they choose to. Because of the reflective quality of the black granite, the wall gives back to those who visit the memorial images of themselves and the surrounding landscape.

The structure was praised by architects, the judges, and Jan Scruggs, the founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. Several veterans and other prominent figures, however, opposed it. Some of them called it “a black ditch,” “an outrage,” and the “black gash of shame.” Its supporters called the design “moving” and praised its “extraordinary sense of dignity.” As the controversy became more heated and opposition and support for the memorial increased, a compromise was reached, and James Watt, secretary of the interior, issued final approval. The memorial was dedicated on November 13, 1982. A bronze statue of three servicemembers, sculpted by Frederick Hart, was placed near the wall and dedicated on November 11, 1984.

In a 1996 Smithsonian magazine article, Lin said that she envisaged the memorial not as an object placed into the earth but as a cut in the earth that was polished, similar to a geode. “Interest in the land and concern about how we are polluting the air and water of the planet are what make me want to travel back in geologic time to witness the shaping of the earth before man.”

Lin’s second major design, the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, was dedicated in the fall of 1989. The inspiration for the project came from a paraphrase of a verse in the biblical Book of Amos that was spoken by the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.: “We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” The main idea of the memorial is that water flows over those words and over the names, each carved into the black granite, of forty men, women, and children who were killed during the course of the Civil Rights movement. Like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the work invites visitors to touch the names, this time through the water, and therefore bring some part of themselves to the act of honoring the dead.

In the case of the Civil Rights Memorial, Edward Ashworth, a board member of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), contacted Lin to see if she would be interested in designing it. The center sent her books about the Civil Rights movement and about various hate groups, including the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Lin was deeply moved by the stories of the people who gave their lives for civil rights. She was especially moved by the story of Michael Donald, an African American teenager who was lynched by the KKK in 1981, and the successful prosecution by the SPLC of the person guilty of the murder. Like many people in America, Lin had never learned about these activists in school and was shocked to discover that many of them had been killed during her lifetime. She readily agreed to design a memorial that would occupy the plaza in front of the center in Montgomery.

The Civil Rights Memorial consists of two parts, both of which are made of Canadian black granite. One part is a large nine-foot-tall panel with the carved inscription “...until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream –Martin Luther King Jr.” Water cascades down the panel, covering the inscription but allowing it to be read. The second part is a circular tabletop, almost twelve feet in diameter, resting on a pedestal. On the top of the structure are fifty-three brief entries carved into the stone in chronological order. Forty of the entries describe individual deaths; thirteen describe landmark events in the Civil Rights movement. Water comes out of the middle of the tabletop and gently flows over the inscriptions. As envisioned by Morris Dees, the director of the SPLC, the memorial has become a teaching tool for those who come and read the inscriptions. It is also a place of quiet reflection where visitors can come to understand that these individuals influenced history and helped to make things better.

In 1995, Lin undertook a similarly participatory work for the University of Michigan. The Wave Field is a 10,000-square-foot field of manicured grass over waves of soil and sand. Located in front of the university’s aerospace engineering building, it is a peaceful place for people to stroll, rest, or play. Its design alludes to the physical basis for aerodynamic and fluid mechanics represented specifically by the Stokes wave, but it also recalls the waves typical in paintings from the Song Dynasty (960–1279) of China. Like Lin’s other works, the Wave Field both appeals to private viewings, especially as seen whole from a distance, and invites the public to come in contact with it and mingle while doing so.

In 2000, Lin began working on the Confluence Project, a series of four major public artworks along the route traveled by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark through what is now Washington State and Oregon on the last leg of their epic expedition across North America (1804–1806). Located at Cape Disappointment, Vancouver Land Bridge at Fort Vancouver, Celilo Falls Park, Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge, the Sandy River Delta, Sacajawea State Park, and Chief Timothy Park, the pieces have been designed to consider the points of view of both the explorers and the American Indians they encountered. The project's first installation, at Cape D, was dedicated in 2006. The Vancouver Land Bridge and Sandy River Delta installation, Bird Blind, was dedicated in 2008, followed by Story Circles in Sacajawea State Park in 2010. The last installation, Chief Timothy, was installed at Chief Timothy Park in Clarkson in 2015. Lin's environmentalism is embodied in her 2009 multi-site, interactive memorial for the planet, What Is Missing?, which she deemed her last memorial.

Lin also has excelled in sculpture and various kinds of architectural work during her professional career. Her public artwork includes TOPO, an environmental sculpture for the city of Charlotte in North Carolina; Groundswell, the first sculpture commissioned for the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio; the Women’s Table, an outdoor sculpture dedicated to women at Yale University; and Timetable, at Stanford University in California, comprising a set of massive rotating metal wheels and sets of engraved numbers tracking time in various zones. Lin’s architectural work has included the Museum for African Art in the SoHo district of New York City; the Rosa Esman Gallery and the Museum of Chinese America, both also in New York City; Smith College's Neilson Library in Northampton, Massachusetts; and private homes in Santa Monica, California, and in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Lin has also pursued her interest in her own studio sculpture, creating human-scaled works made from beeswax, lead, steel, and broken glass. These works have been exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Columbus, Ohio.

A theme running through many of Lin’s works is that of multigenerational time and the future of the world. In a 2006 statement in Nature Conservancy magazine, she wrote,

"My dream for the future is that we evolve into beings that care about the far distant future. That we evolve to care not just about our own species, but also about the other living creatures with which we share this planet."

Like both of her parents, Lin has also taught at the university level. She has taught at Yale and held the post of visiting artist at the Yale School of Art. She has lectured at many museums and educational institutions, including the University of Washington, the Wexner Center for the Arts, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Art, Wellesley College, and Qinghua University of Beijing, China.

In addition to her professional work, Lin also has served on several community boards. Her interest in environmental issues led her to serve on the board of the Energy Foundation and on the national advisory board to the Presidio Council in San Francisco. She has also served on the board of the Ohio University Museum of Art and on the advisory board of the SPLC.

Lin has been notably retiring and modest about her artistic celebrity. After the film Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision (1994; produced by Freida Lee Mock) won an Academy Award for best documentary, many of her close friends were astonished; she had not told them about the project. About the Vietnam Veterans Memorial she once said that she never would have won if the competition selection process had used names rather than numbers to identify projects.

Lin has received the Presidential Design Award, the American Institute of Architects’ Honor Award, and the Henry Bacon Memorial Award. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts visual artists’ grant and has received honorary doctorates of fine arts from Yale, Smith College, and Williams College. In 2002 she became an Alumni Fellow of the Yale Corporations, which governs the university, and in 2003 she served as a selection juror for the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition. In 2005 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2009. She received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016.

Lin married Daniel Wolf, a photography dealer, and they have two daughters, India and Rachel. Lin opened Maya Lin Studios in New York City’s Bowery district.

Significance

Lin’s significant contributions to architecture include public memorials in the United States that celebrate two of the most important social issues of the latter half of the twentieth century: the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which has become the most visited memorial in Washington, DC, and honors the fallen members of the armed forces; and the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, which honors those who died for civil rights. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, described as “perhaps the most moving war memorial ever built,” was recognized by the US Postal Service on November 20, 1984, when it issued a twenty-cent stamp to commemorate the memorial.

Early in her career, Lin became one of the most celebrated and accomplished architects in the United States. She proved that women can succeed in the male-dominated field of architecture, and her success has opened the doors for others to follow.

Bibliography

Ashabranner, Brent. Always to Remember: The Story of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. New York: Dodd, 1988. Print. This book, which is appropriate for middle- and high-school age students, provides a good background on the controversy surrounding the Vietnam War as well as the memorial itself.

Beardsley, John, and Richard Andrews. Maya Lin: Systematic Landscapes. New Haven: Yale UP, 2006. Print. Written to complement an exhibition of the same name at the University of Washington, this book contains enthralling photographs of Lin’s artwork and essays by the authors and a foreword by Lawrence Weschler that comment on both the exhibit and Lin’s works. Includes a bibliography.

Busse, Art. "River of Tears: Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial." Architects Journal. EMAP Publishing, 22 Nov. 2013. Web. 20 Dec. 2013.

"The Confluence Project." Maya Lin Studio, www.mayalinstudio.com/memory-works/confluence. Accessed 5 June 2024.

Ezell, Edward Clinton. Reflections on the Wall: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Harrisburg: Stackpole, 1987. Print. An excellent pro-and-con account of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Kno, Carol. "Maya Lin's New Memorial Is a City." New York Times. New York Times, 25 Apr. 2013. Web. 20 Dec. 2013.

Lin, Maya. Boundaries. New York: Simon, 2000. Print. This is a visual and verbal sketchbook of Lin’s art, beautifully illustrated and spacious in design. The text discusses her art and her methods of composition, and provides some biographical background.

Lin, Maya. "Maya Lin: A Memorial to a Vanishing Natural World." Interview by Diane Toomey. Yale Environment 360. Yale University, 25 June 2012. Web. 20 Dec. 2013.

Lopes, Sal. The Wall: Images and Offerings from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. New York: Collins, 1987. Print. An excellent pictorial work that captures the beauty and emotions of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

"Maya Lin." Britannica, 23 Apr. 2024, www.britannica.com/biography/Maya-Lin. Accessed 5 June 2024.

Reed, Amanda. "What Is Missing?: Maya Lin's Memorial on the Sixth Extinction." WorldChanging. Architecture for Humanity, 12 Oct. 2010. Web. 20 Dec. 2010.

Scruggs, Jan C., and Joel L. Swerdlow. To Heal a Nation: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial. New York: Harper, 1985. Print. An excellent overview of the history of the memorial, including the controversy surrounding the selection of Lin’s design and the harsh politics surrounding public memory and public architecture.

Zinsser, William. “Deeds and Deaths That Made Things Better.” Smithsonian 22 (Sept. 1991). Print. An excellent article detailing the background and the impact of the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery.