This 21-Year-Old College Student Designed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

On June 6, 1981, Maya Yang Lin won the competition to design the Vietnam War Memorial. Controversial at first, it has become a much beloved memorial for Vietnam veterans. From the article:

"Instead of something heroic or celebratory, Lin imagined two stark black walls that began inside the earth, then grew and grew in height until they met—like a “wound that is closed and healing.” The V-shaped wall, designed to point toward the Lincoln and Washington Memorials, would be inscribed with the names of the dead in chronological order. It would exist inside a park, as inextricable from the landscape as it was from the minds of Americans.

“I just wanted to be honest with people,” Lin told The Washington Post. “I didn’t want to make something that said ‘They’ve gone away for a while.’ I wanted something that would just simply say ‘They can never come back. They should be remembered.’”

The jury, which judged the entries blind, agreed. (Meanwhile, Lin only got a B on her assignment; she ended up beating out her professor in the competition.) But Lin’s bleak concept didn’t sit well with many members of the public, who expected a more imposing, complex and grandiose monument with marble, columns and statues in the vein of other buildings on the Mall, like the Lincoln or Jefferson Memorials."