![]() ![]() In these, Lin seeks to discover “how a sculptor can draw three-dimensionally,” and the results are primal, elemental and exquisite. Quietly they slither and roll, tactile and suited to tread upon and touch. They are modern Nazca lines, but they represent no mythology or animal. ![]() From the ground, they appear as humps reverberating in the landscape, but from the air their true forms are revealed. With titles such as “Eleven Minute Line,” “Flutter” and “A Fold in the Field,” each charts a peculiar trajectory and creates a unique experience for the viewer. These mounds curl and wind through rural dairy fields and manicured patrician yards alike. Over the past decade, she has taken to constructing great grassy mounds reminiscent of ancient American burial sites. Lines fascinate her, with thickness, curvature and course lending each line a distinctive character and energy. The geometry blurring into abstraction of Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial recurs throughout her recent oeuvre. She has stepped away from the memorials and monuments that catalyzed her meteoric rise, though these still echo in many of her contemporary pieces. While flipping through a PowerPoint displaying her recent work, it became clear that Lin has shifted her focus from architecture to art, mainly the sculptural. But the time Lin spent stepping off her soapbox and discussing the intersection of her art with its environment proved far more insightful. Indeed, Lin, that most prodigious of alumni architects who famously designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial while a senior at Yale, spent a large portion of the lecture evangelizing about the dangers of climate change. And yet she is in a class by herself.“My work has always been about the environment,” Maya Lin ’81 ARC ’89 noted in a lecture given at the Yale University Art Gallery on Oct. Distinguished with a number of accolades, Maya Lin was named to President Barack Obama‘s 2016 class of Presidential Medal of Freedom winners, alongside Frank Gehry. The perception of Lin as primary to interdisciplinary design, however, is firm. ![]() Her works seize on empathy and evoke emotion yet avoid firm conclusions of any kind, leaving responses to viewers. One doesn’t so much as encounter a building or a piece of art by Maya Lin as experience it-physically and in a sensorial way. Built into an existing cantilevered barn structure to maintain the building’s integrity but given a new interior skin, the 2,000-square-foot library is a historically American building and Maya Lin’s experiment in lines and light. The grounds also feature the Chapel’s vernacular opposite: the Langston Hughes Library. ![]() Shaped like an ark, it soars precisely for its simplicity and expresses an Asian sensibility.Ĭonstructed from cypress siding with fir for its roof, deck and beams, the Chapel connects to a contrasting concrete-block building conceptualized to resemble a storage building commonly found in shipyards. Maya Lin graced these 157-acre grounds with a modern vernacular via the Riggio-Lynch Interfaith Chapel, which she designed as a place of cultural solidarity and sanctuary after the events of Sept. This includes her architecture, both private and public projects, and convergences of Eastern and Western worlds, of which her additions to the Children’s Defense Fund’s Alex Haley Farm in Tennessee are an exquisite example. A native of rural Ohio, Maya Lin grew up when Rachel Carson released her environmental treatise Silent Spring and in an interview with Bill Moyers, Maya Lin described her work as, “about appreciating and being respectful of nature.” These sculptural mounds of earth express Maya Lin’s larger reverence for land and landscapes and are a form of environmental activism. Among these are site-specific earthworks, including her well-regarded wave fields-undulations of grassy terrain in unexpected settings. Her projects reference a variety of geologic phenomena. Decades later, the memorial is an American treasure and Maya Lin, no longer the disruptor, is perceived much like her groundbreaking design-distinctly and significantly visioned.Ī vision like Maya Lin’s is as remarkably rare as it is prolifically applied both artist and architect, her range of work pendulates from memorials, cultural centers, and other buildings to sculpture and large-scale environmental installations. Maya Lin’s spare concept-its polished black granite, register of names and horizontal orientation-intuited a very different public memorial, one that veered dramatically from the usual visual rhetoric, and was immediately controversial. ![]()
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