Maya Lin’s Vietnam
Veterans Memorial
G'day folks,
Tonight, I will be guest speaker at a Vietnam Veteran's organisation here in Australia, so I thought it timely to present something relevant.
As the United States honors
those who served in the military on Veterans Day, read the story of how an
unknown 21-year-old architecture student, Maya Lin, designed one of the most
moving monuments in the nation’s capital—the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Whenever
18-year-old Maya Lin
walked through Yale University’s Memorial Rotunda, she couldn’t resist passing
her fingers over the marble walls engraved with the names of those alumni who
died in service of their country. Throughout her freshman and sophomore years,
she watched as stonecutters added to the honor roll by etching the names of
those killed in the Vietnam War. “I think it left a lasting impression on me,”
Lin wrote, “the sense of the power of a name.”
Those
memories were fresh in the mind of the daughter of Chinese immigrants senior
year when, as part of an assignment in her funereal architecture seminar, she
designed a walled monument to veterans of the Vietnam War that was etched with
the names of those who gave their lives. Encouraged by her professor, the
architecture student entered it in the national design competition being held
for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to be built on the National Mall in
Washington, D.C.
Adhering to the competition rules that required the memorial to
be apolitical and contain the names of all those confirmed dead and missing in
action in the Vietnam War, Lin’s design called for the names of nearly 58,000
American servicemen, listed in chronological order of their loss, to be etched
in a V-shaped wall of polished black granite sunken into the ground.
The competition garnered more
than 1,400 submissions, so many that an Air Force hangar was called into
service to display all the entries for the judging. Since all submissions were
anonymous, the eight-member jury made its selection based solely on the quality
of the designs. It ultimately chose entry number 1026, which it found to be “an
eloquent place where the simple meeting of earth, sky and remembered names
contains messages for all.”
Her
design only earned a B in her class at Yale, so Lin was shocked when
competition officials came to her dormitory room in May 1981 and informed the
21-year-old that she had won the design and the $20,000 first prize. Not only
was Lin not a trained architect, she didn’t even have a bachelor’s degree in
architecture at the time. “From the very beginning I often wondered, if it had
not been an anonymous entry 1026 but rather an entry by Maya Lin, would I have
been selected?” she later wrote.
Although
she designed an apolitical monument, the politics of the Vietnam War could not
be avoided. Like the war itself, the monument proved controversial. Veterans
groups decried the lack of patriotic or heroic symbols often seen on war
memorials and complained that it seemingly honored only the fallen and not the
living veterans. Some argued that the memorial should rise from the ground and
not sink into the earth as if it was something to be hidden. Businessman H. Ross Perot, who had pledged
$160,000 to help run the competition, called it a “trench” and withdrew his
support. Vietnam veteran Tom Cathcart was among those objecting to the
memorial’s black hue, which he said was “the universal color of shame and
sorrow and degradation.” Other critics thought Lin’s V-shaped design was a
subliminal anti-war message that imitated the two-finger peace sign flashed by
Vietnam War protestors.
“One needs no artistic education to see this memorial design for
what it is,” remarked one critic, “a black scar, in a hole, hidden as if out of
shame.” In a letter to President Ronald Reagan,
27 Republican congressmen called it “a political statement of shame and
dishonor.”
Secretary of the Interior
James Watt, who administered the site, sided with the critics and blocked the
project until changes were made. Over Lin’s objection, the federal Commission
of Fine Arts bowed to political pressure and approved the addition to the
memorial of a 50-foot-high flagpole on which to fly the Stars and Stripes and
an eight-foot-high statue of three soldiers sculpted by Frederick Hart, who
called Lin’s design “nihilistic.” The commission, however, mandated that they
not be placed directly adjacent to the wall in order to preserve Lin’s design
intent as much as possible. (A statue dedicated to the women who served in the
Vietnam War was also added to the site in 1993.)
Clancy's comment: Mm ... Lest we forget those who died, and especially those who survived but still suffer.
I'm ...
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