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MAKING THE MEMORIAL
NED LEVINE
BY MAYA LIN
I think the most important aspect of the design of the
Vietnam Veterans Memorial was that I had originally designed
it for a class I was taking at Yale and not for the competition In
that sense, I had designed it for me — or, more exactly, for what
I believed it should be. I never tried to second-guess a jury And
it wasn't until after I had completed the design that I decided to
enter it into the competition
The design emerged from an architectural seminar I was
taking during my senior year. The initial idea of a memorial had
come from a notice posted at the school announcing a competi­
tion for a Vietnam veterans memorial The class, which was on
funereal architecture, had spent the semester studying how
people, through the built form, express their attitudes toward
death As a class, we thought the memorial was an appropriate
design for our program, so we adopted it as our final design
project.
At that point, not much was known about the actual
competition, so for the first half of the assignment we were left
without concrete directions for what "they" were looking for or
even who they were. Instead, we had to determine for ourselves
vtfiat a Vietnam memorial should be Since a previous project
had been to design a memorial for World War 3.1 had already
begun to ask the simple questions: What exactly is a memorial
What should it do?
My design for a World War 3 memorial was a tomblike
underground structure that I deliberately made to be a very futile
and frustrating experience I remember the professor of the
class coming up to me afterward, saying quite angrily, "If I had
a brother who died in that war, I would never want to visit this
memorial" I was somewhat puzzled that he didn't quite under­
stand that World War 3 wuld be of such devastation that none
of us would be around to visit any memorial, and that my design
was instead a pre-war commentary. In asking myself what a
memorial to a third world war would be I came up with a political
statement that was meant as a deterrent.
I had studied earlier monuments and memorials while
designing that memorial and I continued this research for the
design of the Vietnam memorial As I did more research on
monuments, I realized most earned larger, more general
messages about a leader's victory or accomplishments rather
than the lives lost In fact, at the national level, individual lives
were very seldom dealt with, until you arrive at the memorials
for World War 1 Many of these memorials included the names
of those killed Partly it was a practical need to list those vtfiose
bodies could not be identified — since dogtags as identification
had not yet been adopted and, owing to the nature of the
warfare, many were not identifiable — but I think as well the
listing of names reflected a response by these designers to
the horrors of World War 1, to the immense loss of life
The images of these monuments were extremely
moving. They captured emotionally what I felt memorials should
FOR THE DEAD OF THE VIETNAM WAR
"For what?" wind in the Vietnamese military cemetery asks
Better to sigh your question heavenward a Buddha, a Christ
is the court of last resort in determining this matter
After the gun barrels have cooled
man conquers beast when the pain is great enough,
for just a moment that old divine spark carries us
re-cycled metal, once the wreckage of a B-52, holds water,
and the old gun barrels have become plumbing
-A lex B lack
be: honest about the reality of war, about the loss of life in war,
and about remembering those who served and especially those
who died.
I made a conscious decision not to do any specific
research on the Vietnam War and the political turmoil surround­
ing it. I felt that the politics had eclipsed the veterans, their
service, and their lives. I wanted to create a memorial that
everyone would be able to respond to, regardless of whether
one thought our country should or should not have participated
in the war. The power of a name was very much with me at the
time, partly because of the Memonal Rotunda at Yale. In Wool­
sey Hall, the walls are inscribed wth the names of all the Yale
alumni who have been killed in wars. I had never been able to
resist touching the names cut into these marble walls, and no
matter how busy or crowded the place is, a sense of quiet, a
reverence, always surrounds those names. Throughout my
freshman and sophomore years, the stonecutters were carving
in by hand the names of those killed in the Vietnam War, and I
think it left a lasting impression on me...the sense of the power
of a name
One memorial I came across also made a strong
impression on me It was a monument to the missing soldiers
of the World War 1 Battle of the Somme by Sir Edwin Lutyens
in Thiepval, France The monument includes more than 100,000
names of people who were listed as missing because, without
ID tags, it was impossible to identify the dead. (The cemetery
contains the bodies of 70,000 dead.) To walk past those names
and realize those lost lives — the effect of that is the strength
of the design. This memorial acknowledged those lives without
focusing on the war or on creating a political statement of victory
or loss This apolitical approach became the essential aim of
my design; I did not want to civilize war by glorifying it or by
forgetting the sacrifices involved. The price of human life in war
should always be clearly remembered
But on a personal level, I wanted to focus on the nature
of accepting and coming to terms with a loved one's death.
Simple as it may seem, I remember feeling that accepting a
person's death is the first step to overcome that loss.
I felt that as a culture we were extremely youth-oriented
and not willing or able to accept death or dying as a part of life
The rites of mourning, which in more primitive and older cultures
were very much a part of life, have been suppressed in our
modern times. In the design of the memorial, a fundamental
goal was to be honest about death, since we must accept that
loss in order to begin to overcome it. The pain of the loss will
always be there, it will always hurt, but we must acknowledge
the death in order to move on.
What then wuld bnng back the memory of a person?
A specific object or image would be limiting. A realistic sculpture
vould be only interpretation of that time I wanted something
that all people could relate to on a personal level. At this time I
had as yet no form, no specific artistic image
The use of the names was a way to bring back every­
thing someone could remember about a person. The strength
in a name is something that has always made me wonder at
the "abstraction" of the design; the ability of a name to bring
back every single memory you have of that person is far more
realistic and specific and much more comprehensive than a
still photograph, which captures a specific moment in time or
a single event or a generalized image that may or may not be
moving for all who have connections to that time
Then someone in the class received the design program
which stated the basic philosophy of the memorial's design and
also its requirements: all the names of those missing and killed
(57,000) must be a part of the memorial; the design must be
apolitical, harmonious with the site, and conciliatory.
I always wanted the names to be chronological, to make
it so that those who served and returned from the war could find
their place in the memorial I initially had the names beginning
on the left side and ending on the right. In a preliminary critique,
a professor asked what importance that left for the apex, and I,
too, thought it was a weak point, so I changed the design for the
final critique. Now the chronological sequence began and ended
at the apex so that the timeline would circle back to itself and
close the sequence. A progression in time is memorialized.The
design is not just a list of the dead. To find one name, chances
are you will see the others close by, and you will see yourself
reflected through them.
The memorial was designed before I decided to enter
the competition. I didn’t even consider that it might win. When
I submitted the project, I had the greatest difficulty trying to
describe it in just one page It took longer, in fact, to write the
statement that I felt was needed to accompany the required
drawings than to design the memorial. The description was
critical to understanding the design since the memorial worked
more on an emotional level than a formal level.
Many of the issues that I dealt with were connected
with the text of the memorial and my decision to list the names
chronologically. People felt it would be an inconvenience to
search out a name in a book then find its panel location and
thought that an alphabetical listing would be more convenient —
until a tally of how many Smiths had died made it clear that an
alphabetical listing wouldn't be feasible. The MIA groups wanted
their list of the missing separated out and listed alphabetically.
I knew this would break the strength of the timeline, interrupting
the real-time experience of the piece, so I fought hard to main­
tain the chronological listing. I ended up convincing the groups
that the time in which an individual was noted as missing was
the emotionally compelling time for family members. A system
of noting these names with a symbol that could be modified if
the veteran was later found alive or officially declared dead
would appease the concerns of the MIA groups without breaking
the timeline. I knew the timeline was key to the experience of
the memorial: a returning veteran would be able to find his or
her time of service when finding a friend's name.
The text of the memorial and the fact that I had left out
everything except the names led to a fight about what else
needed to be said about the war The apex is the memorial's
strongest point; I argued against the addition of text at that point
for fear that a politically charged statement, one that would force
a specific reading, would destroy the apolitical nature of the
design. Throughout this time I was very careful not to discuss
my political beliefs; I played it extremely naive about politics,
instead turning the issue into a purely aesthetic one. Text could
be added, but whatever was said needed to fit in three lines —
to match the height of the dates '1959' and '1975' that it would
be adjacent to. The veterans approved this graphic parameter,
and the statements became a simple prologue and epilogue.
The memorial is analogous to a book in many ways.
Note that on the right-hand panels the pages are set ragged right
and on the left they are set ragged left, creating a spine at the
apex as in a book. Another issue was scale; the text type is the
OPENING THE BOOK
OF THE DEAD
The names of the American dead occupy the black
marble wall of the Vietnam War Memorial chronologically by the
days of their deaths, arranged in daily sequence in alphabetical
order. I was at the Wall when it was dedicated in 1982, looking
for the names of a few friends I last saw wrapped in ponchos
and tossed aboard outgoing helicopters I purchased a large
book the size of the phone directory of a small city It contained
the names of the 55,000 dead engraved on the Wall and w4iere
each was located
I left Washington, D C with my friends from Oregon.
We drove through Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nebraska,
Wyoming, Utah. Idaho and Oregon, reaching home in Cannon
Beach five days later.
We stopped every night at motels or the homes of
friends or relatives, and each day we made several stops for
food, gas and just to get out and stretch. On the back window
of our small truck was a Vietnam Veterans of America sticker,
the group that built and dedicated the Wall Everywhere we
stopped people noticed the sticker and almost everyone was
related to or had known men who were killed in Vietnam.
Everywhere we stopped I opened the book of the
American dead and found the names the people wished to see
Many of them ran their fingers across the written names as had
most of us the carved names of our friends on the Wall
In this manner I crossed the continent. By the time I
reached the Pacific Coast the American book of the dead was
as well-thumbed as a phone book in a public booth Until then I
had not really understood the personal impact of Vietnam on
America's heart Each time I opened the book I felt I was
performing a ritual of immense unrecognized grief
-M ichael
mccusker