Maya Lin: Much More Than Just Memorials

October 26, 2015Maya Lin has recently published a new monograph, Topologies, chronicling her entire career (photo by Walter Smith). Top: Lin designed the Ellen S. Clark Hope Plaza, which opened in 2010 at the Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri. Photos, unless otherwise noted, courtesy of Rizzoli

Maya Lin deserves a victory lap. It has been more than 30 years since Lin, then a Yale undergraduate, won the competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. That early success made her famous, but not always in ways she liked. “Every time there was a bombing or a plane crash, I would get a fax,” she told me in 1999. Hoping to be known as more than “a person whose work concerns death and destruction,” she accepted few further memorial commissions, instead pursuing what she saw as two different careers. “I want to be taken seriously as an artist, and I want to be taken seriously as an architect,” she said at the time, “and so I consciously keep them as separate fields.”

But that was then. Having achieved success as an artist, whose best work abstracts forms drawn from nature, and as the designer of buildings with sculptural aspirations (as well as the creator of several more memorials), she is beginning to embrace the connections among her diverse bodies of work. As she writes in Topologies (Rizzoli), “Each discipline influences and informs the others.” In fact, Lin is now more interested in connections than in Boundaries (the title of her last big monograph, in 2000). Hence her new book, over the course of 400 pages, chronicles her entire career, starting with the veterans memorial (her handwritten competition entry is reproduced in full), then moving on to less familiar projects. One of the best reasons to buy Topologies is to see Lin’s architecture, including several private homes that can be visited only in photos and two somewhat more public buildings for a Children’s Defense Fund camp in a remote part of Tennessee. (The good news for fans is that a very visible Lin building, the Novartis Institute for Biomedical Research, will open this fall in Cambridge, Massachusetts.)

True, much of Lin’s art is public and hard to miss: Wavefield, which renders the surface of the ocean as an earthwork, covers 11 acres at Storm King Art Center, in upstate New York. The Meeting Room, a memorial to Doris Duke, who spearheaded preservation efforts in Newport, Rhode Island, re-creates in a Newport park the foundations of historic buildings.

The design of Lin’s literally groundbreaking 1982 Memorial for Vietnam Veterans in Washington, D.C., arose out of a class assignment at Yale regarding war memorials. Upon seeing the site for the proposed Vietnam memorial during her Thanksgiving holiday, she had a sudden “impulse to cut open the earth” and polish its open sides “like a geode.” She envisioned the names of the lost engraved on highly polished black granite, so that visitors would see their reflections when reading the names. The radically abstract nature of Lin’s winning design caused bitter controversy, although today the memorial is acclaimed as a masterwork. Photo by Victoria Sambunaris

Wavefield, at the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, is a 2009 earthwork composed of seven undulating rows of earth and grass, ranging in height from 10 to 18 feet, at 40-feet intervals. Lin considers the work the culmination of her explorations of water-wave formations. As the scale is the same as that of swells on the oceans, the experience for the viewer is similar — he or she is pulled into the interior and becomes immersed in the “sea” of grass. Lin’s intervention has reclaimed the site, a former brownfield, by introducing low-impact native grasses, as well as a natural drainage system. Photo by Jerry Thompson, courtesy of Storm King Art Center

 

Lin’s “Earth Drawings” are interventions exploring the gesture and experience of a drawn line within a landscape. The series was inspired by the burial mounds of the Hopewell and Adina tribes in southeastern Ohio, near where she grew up. Early European settlers thought “a more advanced culture from Europe had visited the Americas” when they saw them, she notes, because they seemed too sophisticated to be made by Native Americans. That false assumption prompted this 2004 installation at the Wanås Foundation in Knislinge, Sweden, Eleven Minute Line, which she describes as “somewhere between a walk and a line.” She “sketched” out the line with gravel before using topographic models to fit it into the scale and slope of the pasture. Photo by Anders Norsell, courtesy of Wanås Foundation

 

Lin designed the Box House, 2006, to fulfill a client’s desire for a cubelike residence on a property at the edge of an aspen forest in Telluride, Colorado. Composed of two separate wood-clad volumes connected by two levels of outdoor decks, the building features a larger main box that emerges from the grove, while the second is embedded within the aspens. Hinged wooden shutters on the exterior volume frame the outdoor decks when the client is in residence and can close into the box, literally shuttering it, when the client is away. Photo by Brett Schreckengost

Lin’s interactive project “What Is Missing?” explores how lives have been diminished by environmental degradation.

But her more delicate work, seen at occasional gallery exhibitions (and collected by the likes of Michael Bloomberg and Barnes & Noble founder Leonard Riggio), can be particularly compelling. In one series of pieces, she re-creates rivers — including the Yangtze and the Hudson — using thousands of ordinary metal pins inserted directly into walls. From a distance, the pieces read as silvery pencil drawings; up close, they claim territory as confidently as the work of Richard Serra and Walter De Maria.

Now Lin is devoting much of her time to an especially poignant project. “What Is Missing?” is an account, in a range of media, of how lives have been diminished by environmental degradation; one focus is the loss of species; another, the loss of habitat. A video titled Unchopping a Tree puts rainforest destruction in chilling context: At the current rate of deforestation, New York’s Central Park would last nine minutes; London’s Hyde Park only four. Much of of the piece exists in cyberspace. Visitors to whatismissing.net are invited to describe things — plants, animals, sounds, smells, views — that have disappeared during their lives. A large chunk of Topologies is devoted to the project, which Lin describes as her “final memorial.”

The book has a foreword by the author John McPhee, who has had his Princeton journalism students write about Lin. It also contains celebratory essays by the New Museum director Lisa Phillips, who calls Lin’s work “both literal essence and poetic allusion,” and the architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who focuses on Lin’s restraint. (His essay is called “The Courage to Omit.”) But the most surprising aspect of the book is that the text describing the projects is written by Lin herself, in the first person. The words aren’t especially elegant, but they don’t need to be; they describe, in the plain language of Lin’s native Midwest (she’s from Athens, Ohio), projects that have the power to astonish, inspire and provoke — and, possibly, help save the planet. When the ideas are as strong as Lin’s, they don’t require much elaboration.

Part of Lin’s “What is Missing” project, Listening Cone, 2009, at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, is a bronze gramophone-like form, lined with reclaimed redwood and features a screen for back-projected video at its base. Photo by Bruce Damonte

In 2013, Lin produced a two-part exhibition, “Here and There,” for the Pace Gallery, in London and New York. The London installation explored how the geography of Europe and the surrounding region was being refashioned because of climate change, as well as the disappearance of the largest bodies of fresh water and the Arctic ice cap. Photo by Stephen White, courtesy of Pace Gallery

Lin has long been entranced by rivers, which she regards almost as natural drawings. She also appreciates them because they carry fresh water, the most precious element on earth yet one that is rapidly being depleted and degraded. Lin has made a number of works inspired by rivers, including a series of pieces composed of custom-made stainless-steel pins. When commissioned to make a piece for the new U.S. Consulate in Beijing, Lin created Pin River — Yangtze, 2007, “drawing” the third-longest river in the world. Photo by Juan Dapeng

 

Where the Land Meets the Sea, 2008, at the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco, is one of several works in which Lin materialized through wire the way a computer envisions topologies. The piece reflects the terrain above and below sea level at the mouth of the San Francisco Bay. Photo by Colleen Chartier/ART on FILE

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