ARCHITECT UNITED STATESYou cannot ever forget that war is not just a victory or loss. It’s really about individual lives.
—MAYA LIN, DISCUSSING HER DESIGN FOR THE VIETNAM MEMORIAL
Professor Burr talked on and on. Maya loved her architecture class and thought Burr was brilliant, but some days her mind wandered—especially on beautiful spring days like this one. The students rustled in their chairs when a stranger entered the lecture hall and handed a message to the professor. As he read it, his face changed: a look of shock swept across his features. He cleared his throat and made an announcement.
“The Vietnam War veterans have chosen their winner for the memorial competition . . . ”
Maya and the other students wondered why they brought this message to class. They had each entered a design into the contest for a new national monument in Washington, D.C., to honor Vietnam veterans, but it was just a class assignment—everyone knew a professional architect would win, not a student. Why not let them read about the winner in the newspaper, like everyone else?
“ . . . and the winner is our own Maya Lin!”
The entire room gasped, including Maya. How could it be? Maya was just a college senior, with no real architecture experience. Her design was strange, unlike any memorials the students had ever seen. In fact, Professor Burr had given her a B for her work. And yet she had won over almost 1,500 entries. Professor Burr walked up to Maya and shook her hand.
“Congratulations, Maya,” he said cheerfully, trying to hide his disappointment. He, too, had entered the contest. This young, inexperienced student had beaten him.
This was the first day of Maya’s professional architecture career. She would go on to design some of the most original and beloved monuments in America. But her passion for designing and building began when she was a much younger girl.
Maya’s parents fled China in the late 1940s. Her mother left with just one hundred-dollar bill pinned to the lining of her jacket. When they arrived in America, both were hired by Ohio University; her father became an art professor, and her mother worked as a professor of Oriental and English literature. Once settled in Athens, Ohio, they had a son and then a daughter, Maya.
Maya and her brother grew up on the college campus in a stimulating, artistic environment. “My parents very much brought us up to decide what we wanted to do,” Maya said. “Maybe that is an Eastern philosophy—that you don’t force an opinion on a child.” Later in life, Maya explored many career directions, but even as a young girl, she was fascinated by architecture. She spent many hours in her room building miniature towns out of paper and scraps from her father’s art studio.
When Maya graduated from high school, she was accepted at Yale University, where she studied architecture and sculpture. Her professors wanted her to choose one or the other, but Maya refused. She felt that learning about sculpture improved her architecture skills and vice versa. She said, “Architecture . . . is like writing a book. Everything in a building matters, from the doorknobs to the paint details. And sculpture is like writing a poem. You’re not saying as much. It’s an idea stripped bare.”31 Even now, Maya still uses sculpture to create her architectural designs. First, she builds tiny models, and then she makes detailed drawings from those models.
Maya Lin’s first name comes from a Hindu goddess, the mother of Buddha, and her last name means “forest.”
During her junior year, Maya studied architecture in Europe. She noticed that Europeans went to the beautiful, park-like cemeteries not just to mourn, but also to enjoy the peaceful surroundings. They went there to relax and escape from the busy cities. “I’ve always been intrigued with death,” she explained, “and man’s relation to it.” She realized that death was all around, and people had to seek ways to deal with their grief and find peace.
Back at Yale for her senior year, Maya put her insights to good use on an intriguing class assignment: to design a memorial honoring those who had died in the Vietnam War. The winning design would be built in the Constitution Gardens of Washington, DC. There were only two requirements for the design: (1) the names of the fifty-eight thousand soldiers killed or missing in action should be included, and (2) it should be in harmony with the landscape (it would go between the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument). The selection committee also hoped the design would help America heal the pain of this controversial war.
Before starting on her entry, Maya walked around Constitution Gardens, studying every detail of the location. She asked herself questions like, “How can the relatives of people killed in Vietnam recover from their loss?” and “How can America recover from the war?” Her answer was to create a design that would encourage people to look at their pain, admit their losses, and always remember the war and those who died in it. The design Maya turned in was of two long, black granite walls joined at the center in a 130-degree angle—it looked a bit like two sides of a triangle. Every soldier’s name would be carved into the walls, but the shiny black granite would reflect the image of the viewer. It was as if by looking at the names, visitors would be examining themselves. Since other D.C. monuments were generally realistic statues of people, Maya’s design was unusual, to say the least.
When she first beat out the 1,420 other entries, people were excited that a young woman had won. But her design quickly became a flashpoint for America’s still conflicted emotions about the war. Some people liked Maya’s haunting sculpture, but others were upset that it didn’t look the way they thought a patriotic war memorial should look. The Chicago Tribune said it was “bizarre” and the New York Times called it “a black gash of shame.”
Powerful men in Washington began speaking out against Maya’s entry. Secretary of the Interior James Watt, Texas billionaire Ross Perot, and Senator Jeremiah Denton all fought to stop the project. They were not excited about Maya’s unique vision; in fact, one big complaint was that all the other Washington monuments were white but this one was black. They even criticized Maya, complaining that since she was a young woman who didn’t fight in Vietnam, she couldn’t possibly understand the meaning of the war.
In spite of the public conflict, Maya defended her design and refused to change it. She knew the public would respond to it if it were built. Jan Scruggs, the veteran who led the drive to create the memorial, said of Maya’s courage, “She really believed in this design. . . . The strength of her own convictions carried us through quite a few conflicts.” Against Maya’s wishes, a compromise was reached: a second memorial would be built near Maya’s site. It was a traditional statue of three soldiers, designed by Frederick Hart. Hart was paid $200,000 for his design; Maya was paid $20,000.
Maya wanted only the names of Vietnam soldiers on the wall. She even refused to put her own name on it. It’s behind the wall, out of public view.
When her wall was finally built in 1982, it became an overnight sensation. The critics were silenced. Finally, the nation had a focus for the past thirty years of unresolved grief and anger over Vietnam. The reflective sculpture encouraged visitors to deal with their repressed emotions about Vietnam, and it helped everyone grieve. Visitors leave flowers and mementos below the names of loved ones and even make pencil impressions of the names onto paper to take home with them. The award committee praised its impact: “This one superb design has changed the way war memorials—and monuments as a whole—are perceived.” Maya was honored with the 1988 Presidential Design Award, but more important to her, the Vietnam Memorial is now the most visited memorial in the United States.
Visitors are often surprised at how warm the Wall is to the touch—as if it were alive (the black granite holds the warmth of the sun).
After the Wall, Maya vowed never to do another memorial because of the controversy she’d endured over the Vietnam Memorial. But when she was asked to design the Civil Rights Memorial, she couldn’t refuse. The monument honors the people who fought for equality during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s—from well-known leaders like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. to forgotten heroes. Maya studied history books and the speeches of Dr. King to come up with another innovative design: a black granite wall carved with a quote from Dr. King and veiled by a thin sheet of water flowing over it into a pool. In front of the wall is a large black granite disk inscribed with a chronology of events from the Civil Rights era, from the outlawing of school segregation to the assassination of Dr. King.
Maya continues to work as an architect and has added many new memorials and public sculptures to her portfolio. Her designs never overpower the audience or the space. Their goal is not to intimidate or to lecture, but to inspire people to stop and think. She wants her work to stir emotions in people. The Vietnam Memorial has not only stirred the emotions of hundreds of thousands of visitors, it has also helped Americans come to terms with their conflicting emotions about the war and heal its wounds. She has since designed several more memorials and buildings, including the What Is Missing? installation and the Museum of Chinese in America. She has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy in Rome, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and more. Maya has already left her mark on the world—a mark of peace and reconciliation.
HOW WILL YOU ROCK THE WORLD?
I’m going to rock the world by working on xenotransplantation. The transplantation of animal organs into the bodies of humans will allow thousands of people who wouldn’t have gotten human transplants to live long, healthy lives.
DENA GORDON 
AGE 15