March is Women's History Month
Celebrate Women of Achievement and Herstory
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Compiled and Written by Irene Stuber
who is solely responsible for its content.
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| Tiny, Maya Ling Lin is a woman of amazing
reserve, self control, and dignity - as well as an architectural genius.
MLL was still an architectural student at Yale University when her professor asked all of his students to submit designs for the competition to choose a fitting memorial to Americans killed in Viet Nam. She visited the proposed site for the monument and later said of it, "you couldn't desecrate that land." In one direction is the Lincoln Memorial and in the Washington Memorial. The monument to honor the men and women who were involved in the Korean conflict would rise nearby as would the monument to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Nearby is the first memorial dedicated to the women nurses who fought to save lives during wartime while under personal danger and at times losing their own lives. Her simple design of a wall fading into the distance of a small valley was chosen the best of 1,420 entries by a committee of Nam veterans. However, it was soon condemned as a "degrading ditch, a wall of shame" and even worse . . .one of our citizens announced: "We can't have our memorial built by a gook." Multi-millionare H. Ross Perot flew veterans to Washington by the planeload to protest Lin's design. He almost get enough support to erect a traditional statue of heroic men with an American flag draped around them situated in the center of the wall. A compromise was reached and Frederick Hart's traditional soldier statue - which had finished third in the competition Lin won - was erected at the entrance to the area where the wall was built, but the wall itself was not changed. The dedication was a 48-hour vigil during which the names of the 58,000 dead and missing men soldiers listed on the wall were read. Not only was the wall dedicated without once mentioning Maya Ling Lin's name, but she was not even invited to attend! Even the cover of dedication program had Hart's statue pictured, not the wall. . .and yet within a few months the wall had become and remains one of the most honored and moving memorials in our nation's history. To come to that wall is like seeing the waves of black granite headstones reaching on and on . . . then seeing your living self reflected on the shiny black stone over the names of our dead incised in it has the viewer become one with the memorial - an experience that brings tears in just remembering. A rededication was held a number of years after the first dedication in what some called the veteran's and national apology to the designer. This time Maya Lin was invited. Remarkably she spoke without rancor and with dignity - continuing her amazing dignified self control - giving the dead the homage that their fellow soldiers did not by their rancour. She has never once referred to the design controversy nor the attacks of her ethnic background with bitterness. Lin also designed the 1989 Civil Rights Memorial in Birmingham, Alabama, where viewers' tears become part of the monument . . . The fingers of viewers trace the important dates and personages of the Black Civil Rights movement through a light coating of moving water. She then designed Yale University's Woman's Table that is literally a large table of green granite incised on the surface with a spiraling design of the years being counted off from the university's founding in 1701 through 1991(the year of the monument's dedication). Next to each year is the number of women enrolled at Yale for that year. The stark march of 268 zeroes calls attention to the 268 years there was no room at Yale's educational table for women. It is a devastating revelation of men's disdain for women's rights. The table is set at a 69- degree angle to its base to commemorate the date of 1969 when the first women were admitted to Yale. MLL's next major project was the memorial in Seneca Falls, New York, where viewers step down into the memorial as a symbolic honoring of the women who birthed the women's movement in America. Water rolls gently over the names of the brave women who defied social and legal convention to sign the Sentiment of Rights at their convention in the 1848. In 1994 MLL's translucent clock, Eclipsed Time, was installed in the ceiling of Penn Station in New York City. It has been described as looking much like a flying saucer with the 4.3-m (14-ft)-wide elliptical frosted glass clock illuminated from above. A metal disk, moves slowly across the glowing oval, casting an ever-changing shadow on the numerals below with 12:00 being a total eclipse. MLL also designs great modern houses as well as having designed the interior of a Black cultural museum in New York. One of her most unusual non-architectural projects was a free-form design of glass pellets in shades of blue that were poured into a free flowing design on the wrap-around balcony of an art institute. It was stunning! Another one of her major artistic directions flows from the designs that occur when glass sheets break. Maya Ling Lin's mother was a literature professor and her father a ceramist and dean of fine arts at Ohio State University. Her aunt also studied architecture at Yale. Maya Lin who was born 10-05-1959 in the small city of Athens, Ohio. The author of Women of Achievement and Herstory has been fortunate enough to have seen three of MLL's creations. Go out of your way to see them! There is an amazing movement and depth to her work that causes one to look inward. Emotion is pulled from you, not forced on you. A fascinating documentary of MLL's life won honors and is available from several documentary film rental companies. Copyright 2000 by Irene Stuber. More than 20,000 women's biographies and thousands of facts of herstory have been gathered by istuber and used in the more than 900 episodes of Women of Achievement and Herstory that have been emailed to subscribers over the past ten years. She is in the process of slowly uploaded them to her website. As always, copies of all of istuber's writings about women work may be distributed freely for educational purposes if the copyright is observed and the articles remain unchanged. (Acknowledging her as author is appreciated.) |
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