Maya Lin, Back Again
Artist, architect, memorialist--and now author
She was only 21 and a senior at Yale when she came up with the winning design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial: "a rift in the Earth--a long polished black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the Earth," as her proposal read. The power of that cenotaph, with the names of the dead etched into the stone, has since earned her the accolade of genius many times over. So popular is "the wall" that three replicas tour the country, making her possibly the best known living visual artist in America.
But Maya Lin, now 41, married with two daughters and a small but busy studio in Manhattan, acknowledges that the blessings of early success were mixed. It allowed her to do what she wanted--not only two more prominent commemorative works (the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala., and the Women's Table at Yale) but also sculpture, furniture, landscape design, and domestic and public architecture. Yet the downside was almost as powerful. "I was afraid of becoming a one-hit wonder," Lin says. "It took me at least 10 years to see that I was more than that."
How much more is one subject of her new book, Boundaries. Lin wrote it, she explains, because "I wanted to put in my own words what my own work was about." The theme of her career, as suggested by her book's title, is in-betweenness: Both artist and architect (though she never got her license), Lin is often seen as neither. "Some may think I'm a dilettante," she says. But specialization, for her, "was never a choice." Indeed, to the extent that it's been possible, Lin has tried to blend the suggestive qualities of art with the functional demands of architecture--a blend allowed most freely in memorial design. "A memorial is functional," Lin explains, "but the function is symbolic."
Fluid space. David Hotson, who has worked as the architect of record on a number of Lin's more recent residential projects, says she makes a virtue of collaboration. In home designs, for example, she creates spaces that can be rearranged and transformed by the occupants: Moving panel-like walls, they can make a library and media room part of the living area or, alternatively, an extension of the master bedroom. The way in which the design invites the residents to interact with the form of the house is fundamentally no different from the way Lin's powerful wall invites people to interact with it. The observer or inhabitant completes the design and always does so in different ways. "That notion of architecture being more fluid and moveable comes from Maya's sense of how nature functions as space," Hotson says.
Lin's regard for nature might also explain the subject of what she insists will be her last memorial, a work she calls Extinction. Right now it's only a preliminary idea--six structures on sites like Yellowstone National Park and the mountains of Tibet, plus a coordinating Internet site. Despite the title, Lin intends Extinction to be as much a gesture of hope for species preserved as one of mourning for species lost. "Memorials are not just about the past," she says. "If you make people aware of the extent of extinction, you can also make them aware of what they can do."
This story appears in the October 16, 2000 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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