Maya Lin
After creating the Vietnam War Memorial, Maya Lin became, at the age of twenty-one, one of America’s most significant architects and designers. She was born in 1959 in Athens, Ohio, to an academic family – her father was the Dean of Fine Arts and her mother a professor of literature at Ohio University. In Lin’s senior year at Yale Univeristy, she entered the national competition with her design for the Vietnam War Memorial. Chosen from 1,421 unlabeled submissions, Lin’s simple black walls with the names of all dead and missing in chronological order has become the most visited monument in Washington. Lin has since designed the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama, the enormous translucent clock in the ceiling of New York City’s Pennsylvania Station, an ecology based installation along the Columbia River to commemorate the Lewis and Clark expedition, and the Museum of African Art in New York, along with other projects, private homes, and furniture designs.
