The Quiet Power of Maya Lin
We get a vivid sense of the emotions Lin’s design aroused among those who felt her scheme was disrespectful to the memory of the fallen because of its uncompromising abstraction and the way it is dug into the earth—a grave, a pit, a latrine, detractors charged—rather than elevated to a position of high honor.
.. The guidelines for the competition…insisted that the memorial make no political statement about the war. It might be argued that refusing to discuss the war was tantamount to a negative statement about it and that silence itself could be considered a distinct form of rhetoric.
.. Michael Arad and Peter Walker’s National September 11 Memorial of 2003–2011 on the site of that catastrophe reinterprets several of Lin’s concepts in highly original ways.
.. So as not to become architecture’s Lady of Perpetual Mourning, Lin has turned down all but three subsequent offers to design memorials, including that at Ground Zero. She is now working on what she promises will be her final effort in that vein, the Memorial to the Sixth Extinction, intended to raise awareness of species protection and funded through her What is Missing? Foundation. (The other two commemorative commissions she did accept were the Civil Rights Memorial of 1989 in Montgomery, Alabama, and the Women’s Table of 1993 at Yale, which was commissioned in 1989 to mark twenty years of coeducation at her alma mater.)