Maya Lin

Her parents left China in the late 1940s and landed in Athens, Ohio, where her father became a ceramist and dean of the Ohio University art school and her mother taught literature and wrote poetry. Her half-aunt, Lin Huiyin, is described as the first woman architect in modern China. Her older brother Tan Lin became a poet. She has said she had few friends growing up, stayed home, and loved school, and while she was still at Athens High she was casting bronze in the university foundry and taking its computer programming courses. She went to Yale, took a bachelor's degree in 1981 and a master of architecture in 1986. The first of those degrees arrived after the argument that made her famous had already started.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund was incorporated in April 1979 at the push of a wounded veteran, Jan Scruggs, and secured two acres beside the Lincoln Memorial in 1980. By the March 1981 deadline the competition had drawn 1,421 designs — 1,422 by another count — laid out over 35,000 square feet of an Andrews Air Force Base hangar, identified only by number, cut to 232 and then to 39 before the jury took entry 1026. It specified 72 black granite panels a side, each wall 246 feet long, meeting at 125 degrees, one arm aimed at the Washington Monument and one at the Lincoln Memorial, 57,939 names cut in the order the men died. Everything since has followed: the Civil Rights Memorial, the Women's Table at Yale, two Wave Fields, the Confluence Project, and What Is Missing?

The design was attacked for its color, its lack of ornament, and its sitting below grade. Someone called it a black gash of shame and sorrow. Ross Perot and James Webb, both early backers, withdrew — Webb said he had never imagined such a nihilistic slab of stone. James Watt, Reagan's interior secretary, sat on the building permit. Lin has said that if entries had not been numbered instead of named she would never have won, because of her ethnicity, and a source who heard Perot say it repeatedly reported he called her Eggroll in private. The compromise came on October 13, 1982: a flagstaff, and a bronze group of three soldiers by Frederick Hart, who had sculpted part of the third-place entry. Opponents wanted the bronze at the apex with her wall as backdrop. It went to an entry plaza.

The wall now takes about three million visitors a year, ranked tenth on the AIA's 2007 list of America's favorite architecture, and Scruggs has called it something close to a shrine. The names have grown to 58,320, and 32 of them belong to men who did not die — a deliberate decision to err toward inclusion, corrected only in the directories. Visitors leave thousands of objects a year, and the Park Service catalogs them. Lin took the National Medal of Arts in 2009 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, the citation naming both the wall and the extinction project. Her husband, the photography dealer Daniel Wolf, died in 2021. She is 66 and still building.

Maya Lin's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

• Vietnam Veterans Memorial building
  Two walls of polished black granite, 57,939 names at dedication, in the order of death 1982
• Civil Rights Memorial building
  Montgomery, Alabama 1989
• The Women's Table artwork
  Yale, outside Sterling Memorial Library, counting the women the university admitted 1993
• Confluence Project building
  Installations along the Columbia and Snake rivers in Washington and Oregon 2000
• Museum of Chinese in America building
  Near Manhattan's Chinatown. She wanted her daughters to see that part of their inheritance. 2009
• What Is Missing? artwork
  An ongoing memorial to species and habitat lost. She calls it her last one. 2010

• 1977 aged ~18 Graduates from Athens High School after casting bronze in the university foundry
• March 30, 1981 aged 21 The competition deadline passes with more than 1,400 entries in a hangar Every design was identified by number only.
• 1981 aged ~22 The jury picks entry 1026 and finds it belongs to a 21-year-old undergraduate
• October 13, 1982 aged 23 The Commission of Fine Arts approves a flagstaff and a bronze statue as a compromise Frederick Hart's Three Soldiers went into an entry plaza rather than at the apex.
• November 13, 1982 aged 23 The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is dedicated
• 1986 aged ~27 Takes a Master of Architecture at Yale, five years after the wall
• 1989 aged ~30 Completes the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery
• 2016 aged ~57 Receives the Presidential Medal of Freedom The citation named both the memorial and her work on species loss.
• 2021 aged ~62 Finishes the Smith College library and installs Ghost Forest in Madison Square Park Her husband, Daniel Wolf, died the same year.

• Ross Perot 1930–2019
  Data-processing billionaire whose 1992 independent run won nearly a fifth of the vote. opposed by
• Daniel Burnham 1846–1912
  Architect and planner whose City Beautiful vision shaped downtowns, civic centers, and urban planning. built on the mall replanned by
• I. M. Pei 1917–2019
  Architect whose monumental modern buildings reshaped American civic and cultural architecture. architect she followed
• Martin Luther King Jr. 1929–1968
  Baptist minister and civil rights leader whose nonviolent activism ended legal segregation in America. memorialized the movement of
• Frederick Law Olmsted 1822–1903
  Landscape architect who designed Central Park and established public parks as essential American civic infrastructure. shaped landscape before her
• Lyndon B. Johnson 1908–1973
  36th President who signed the Civil Rights Act and launched the Great Society programs. named the war she was memorializing