Maya lin
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Maya Lin's work is a harmonious blend of art and architecture, creating site-specific installations and memorials that engage with the environment from both micro and macro perspectives. Notable projects include the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which personalizes the experience of remembrance, and the Langston Hughes Library, which integrates modern design with historical architecture. Lin's upcoming project, 'what is missing?', aims to highlight extinct species and places, inviting reflection on environmental loss.
Maya lin
- 2. Maya Lin has maintained a careful balance between art and architecture throughout her career, creating a remarkable body of work that includes large-scale site-specific installations, intimate studio artworks, architectural works and memorials. She peers curiously at the landscape through a twenty-first century lens, merging rational and technological order with notions of beauty and Utilizing technological methods to study and visualize the natural world, Ms. Lin takes micro and macro views of the earth, aerial and satellite mapping devices and translates that information into sculptures, drawings and environmental installations. Her works address how we relate and respond to the environment, and presents new ways of looking at the world around us.
- 3. The sculpture is fabricated from thousands of construction grade 2 x 4's placed on end. 2 x 4 Landscape Wood, 36' x 53' x 10‘ From above they transform a landscape into a pixel-like view of a hill, incrementally rising in height to form the hill. Its form, imaginary but consciously shaped, makes ambiguous the boundary between land and water. It is both reminiscent of a landform and a water wave. The duality of this shape is noticeable as you walk around it, and is oriented in the space so that from two approaches it appears as a simple hill and from the other sides it appears fluid and amorphous, a wave about to crest.
- 4. Blue Lake Pass, Dura flake particleboard, TWENTY 3'x 3' blocks, 18'x 23‘ overall Maya Lin used a terrain chosen from the Rocky Mountain back range to create a topographical sectioned landscape made from cut particleboard. By creating a sculpture that details that topology, applying a 3' x 3' grid to that terrain, and then pulling the terrain apart so that one can walk through the landscape she wanted to shift one's perspective about the land, allowing a viewpoint that is more geologic in character.
- 5. Ecliptic Frey Foundation, Grand Rapids, MI, 2001 The underlying idea of the design involves the uses of water in its three physical states: liquid, solid and vapour. Inspired by the city's name, "Grand Rapids," the use of water is literally the undercurrent to the Park. Embedded into the concrete floor of the amphitheater are fiber optic points of light that map out the exact location of the stars overhead on January 1, 2000, marking the Park's place in time and the passage into the new millennium. These stars are visible year round and are magnified in the winter months, as their light refracts under the ice. The artist imagined a still pond reflecting the night sky.
- 6. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, DC, 1982 Two black granite walls, placed below grade, engraved in chronological order with the names of the men and women who gave their lives in the Vietnam War. At the apex where the two walls meet, the dates 1959 and 1973 (marking the beginning and end of the war) "meet" thus closing the circle of the time span of the war. A returning veteran can find his or her own time upon the wall, making each one's experience of the memorial very personal and individual. The siting of the piece is directly related to the presence of both the Lincoln Monument and Washington Memorial, tying it physically and historically to the site.
- 7. Langston Hughes Library, Clinton, TN, 1999 The design of the Langston Hughes Library maintains the integrity and character of the old barn while introducing a new inner layer. This integration of old and new allowed the artist to leave the main body of the building exposed and untouched and build the library within the existing structure. The interior expresses the idea of a separate inner skin slipping inside the old barn. It is only at the points where the two layers meet that one becomes aware of the transition from old to new.
- 8. The Riggio-Lynch Chapel Children's Defence Fund, Clinton, TN, 2004 At the heart of the design is the abstracted image of a boat or ark that is constructed out of wood and forms the main body of the Chapel. It is both a quiet reminder of the motto of the Children's Defence Fund, "Dear Lord be good to me/ The Sea is so wide/and my boat is so small" and a contextual design decision that allows for the introduction of a modern boat like form into a setting that includes numerous historical log cabins.
- 9. A memorial or monument is known as a single stationary object. Imagine a memorial that would exist not as a fixed static monument, but as a work that would allow us to rethink the idea of a memorial. Imagine a work that could exist in several mediums and in multiple places simultaneously. What is Missing?, Maya Lin's last memorial, will focus attention on species and places that have gone extinct or will most likely disappear within our lifetime. The project exists as a multi-sited installations.