“Vietnam Veterans Memorial” http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/lin/card1.html
This article discusses how Maya Lin designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as experiences of sight, sound and touch. This creates a full-bodied experience of the viewer, connecting us to the design in many ways. She was still an undergraduate at Yale University when she conceived this proposal. Its very simple, unique and beautiful created out of polished, black granite. From a distance it looks like a cut in the landscape, however when you actually enter the work it is designed for the reader of the deceased names to stand below the horizon. 6 feet to be exact, the typical height for the dead to be buried. Lin designs many projects with ways for the viewer to connect to the project without even realizing. The visual scar of the landscape was used to display grief and pain. Its sole proposition is that human life is a harsh cost of war. The names are written along the horizontal walls and the memorial is responsive to the individual experience of the visitor. When a visitor looks at the wall, their reflection is shown within the engraved names, this was meant to symbolically bring both the past and present together. One of the most interesting points of the design is the names are left without rank or unit and everyone is considered the same including women. In total there are as of May 2011, 58,272 names with different symbols beside their names of a cross, a circle or diamond to show if they are missing, dead or returned alive. Lin connects human activities through a beautiful design of a memorial inscribed in the landscape.
This article discusses how Maya Lin designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial as experiences of sight, sound and touch. This creates a full-bodied experience of the viewer, connecting us to the design in many ways. She was still an undergraduate at Yale University when she conceived this proposal. Its very simple, unique and beautiful created out of polished, black granite. From a distance it looks like a cut in the landscape, however when you actually enter the work it is designed for the reader of the deceased names to stand below the horizon. 6 feet to be exact, the typical height for the dead to be buried. Lin designs many projects with ways for the viewer to connect to the project without even realizing. The visual scar of the landscape was used to display grief and pain. Its sole proposition is that human life is a harsh cost of war. The names are written along the horizontal walls and the memorial is responsive to the individual experience of the visitor. When a visitor looks at the wall, their reflection is shown within the engraved names, this was meant to symbolically bring both the past and present together. One of the most interesting points of the design is the names are left without rank or unit and everyone is considered the same including women. In total there are as of May 2011, 58,272 names with different symbols beside their names of a cross, a circle or diamond to show if they are missing, dead or returned alive. Lin connects human activities through a beautiful design of a memorial inscribed in the landscape.
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Maya Lin - Vietnam Veterans Memorial (Washington DC) photo taken from http://mayalin.com |
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