Maya Lin Interview (page: 5 / 9) Artist and Architect	Print Interview

Could you tell us about your senior architecture project at Yale?

Maya Lin: For a senior project in architecture school, you had a choice. You could go off on your own or create a senior seminar with a bunch of other students. I decided to work with a group of students, and what we really wanted to study was funereal architecture.

I had spent my junior year abroad in Denmark and in an architecture studies program, different school. Yale doesn't have a junior year abroad. In fact, you have to tell them that you're going abroad to study something they don't teach which is, they didn't teach Danish, so I could--because I love going into a culture, if I like the architecture. And I love Scandinavian design. So, boom, I went to Denmark. And one of the very first projects, we were all given different segments of Copenhagen to study. I was given this area called Norbrow, which included this enormous park, probably half the size of Central Park, that was also a cemetery. Because in Europe spaces are so tight that you, you have multiple uses. So your cemeteries are habitable, I mean, they're parks. They're--people are walking through, people are strolling through. And I think it was very interesting. And then as I went through Europe that summer I went to Père Lachaise in France. And it was just one of those things. So when I came back to Yale -- I don't know how this conversation came up, but we all -- there were a few of us that thought a course as our senior seminar that focused on the architecture of death essentially would be really interesting. And what does that mean? It's like, God, at the time the reporters had a heyday with it. It's like morbid curiosity. It's more like how humanity deals with mortality in the built form.
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And in the course of that semester...

Someone saw a bulletin for a competition for the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial. And we thought, "What a great idea! We'll use that as our final project." So I designed what I thought was the right solution for a course. And we had barely been given any information. Someone wrote away for the program book later on and read through it. But in a way, I think when you're doing something in architecture school, you're doing it for yourself. And I did it. And it wasn't until the next semester, which was my final, my spring semester, that I decided to enter it into the actual competition as an exercise.
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As a student, competitions are how you were -- they're what you do as a good exercise. And the only clue that I had to what I had made was that for the final clip you invite visiting architects to critique your work and then you get up and you present. So I presented my piece. And then over that Christmas Holiday I was visiting a friend's uncle -- my girl friend -- and we went up to see his house in Vermont, a fairly well-known architect, and he was going to give me advice on my senior portfolio so I could get out and look for a summer job. And he's looking through, and then he stops and he starts telling me -- because as he gets to the sketches for the Vietnam (I had included them in the portfolio) he starts telling me about this design for the Vietnam Memorial that he had heard about, and as he starts talking about it, I realize he is telling me about my design. And I'm realizing, I should enter this because I think it's an important thing to say. It's not going to win. And I entered it.
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What inspired the design?

Maya Lin: Probably fundamentally -- a previous design had been a memorial to World War III. And I started studying what the nature of a monument is and what a monument should be. And I designed -- for the World War III memorial I designed a futile, almost terrifying passage that ends nowhere. And the professor of the class was extremely disturbed and comes up to me afterward and says, "If I had a brother that died in that war, I would never want to visit the memorial." And I looked at him and I said, "Andy, this is World War III, we're not going to be around. Don't you get it?" I mean he just didn't get it. So every memorial in its time has a different goal.
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For me what the Vietnam memorial had to be was about honesty, about dealing up front with individual loss. You know, it turns out it was also a requirement by the veterans to list the 57,000 names. Now, you've got ask again, this is probably the first time where the group of veterans have requested it. We're reaching a time in -- it's almost a modern time -- that we'll acknowledge the individual in a war on a national level, rather than what has happened in previous wars throughout history was always a political statement by the winning leader about the victory. The foot soldier didn't count, except in World War I memorials which I had studied and realized -- The effect they had, they were so moving, was because they focused on individual loss. But I think that is the definition of a modern approach to war, the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.
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