Vietnam Veterans Memorial
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, commonly called the Vietnam Memorial, is a U.S. national memorial in Washington, D.C., honoring service members of the U.S. armed forces who served in the Vietnam War. The two-acre (8,100 m2) site is dominated by two black granite walls engraved with the names of those service members who died or remain missing as a result of their service in Vietnam and South East Asia during the war. The Memorial Wall was designed by American architect Maya Lin and is an example of minimalist architecture. The Wall, completed in 1982, has since been supplemented with the statue Three Soldiers in 1984 and the Vietnam Women's Memorial in 1993.
Vietnam Veterans Memorial wall in 2014
An aerial photograph of The Wall taken on April 26, 2002, by the United States Geological Survey. The dots visible along the length of the angled wall are visitors. For a satellite view of the Wall in relation to other monuments, see Constitution Gardens.
The monument's eastern portion points towards the Washington Monument
One panel of The Wall, displaying some of the names of fallen U.S. service members from the Vietnam War
Maya Ying Lin is an American architect, designer and sculptor. Born in Athens, Ohio to Chinese immigrants, she attended Yale University to study architecture. In 1981, while still an undergraduate at Yale she achieved national recognition when she won a national design competition for the planned Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. The memorial was designed in the minimalist architectural style, and it attracted controversy upon its release but went onto become influential. Lin has since designed numerous memorials, public and private buildings, landscapes, and sculptures. In 1989, she designed the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama. She has an older brother, the poet Tan Lin.
Lin's winning submission for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial design competition
2 × 4 Landscape (2006) at the De Young Museum in San Francisco in January 2009
Lin's The Women's Table in front of the Sterling Memorial Library, commemorating the role of women at Yale University