Vietnam Memorial at night
In the spring of 1980, a design competition was held in Washington DC to create a memorial to the fallen soldiers of a lost war. The war to be memorialized was, up to that time, the longest conflict that the United States had ever participated in. It was a war that split the American public along fault lines of political belief and moral certainty. The Vietnam War was fought from 1959 to 1975, on the far side of the world with bullets and bombs, and with marches and sit-ins at home.
But by the end of the decade of the 1970’s a group of veterans felt that it was time to begin the nation’s healing process and formed the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, with the primary goal of building a monument to the 59,000 American service men and women who had lost their lives in this controversial conflict. The money was raised and official Washington signed off on supporting the construction by donating a prominent location in the middle of America’s front lawn, the Washington Mall.
An esteemed group of architects and artists formed the committee that would sift through 1,432 entries, the most that had ever been submitted to a design competition such as this. An airplane hangar at Andrews Airforce Base was in fact needed to display all 1400 equally and fairly so that the jury could view them in an efficient manner. The criteria for the design, simply put, was that the memorial had to respectfully remember the fallen military members while not choosing a side in the cultural rift left by the war, nor make any particularly overt political statement. By the end of the selection process, one entry was plucked from the mass of drawings, sketches, and narratives, one that stood out to the jurors.
A very young, 21 year old architecture student from Yale University had designed a monument that looked like no other monument previously designed. And when the jury put forth this winning proposal, it seemed that the war, at least at home, was going to be reprised. Up until this time, war monuments were very much of a particular format. You got a soldier on a horse brandishing a sword, made out of white marble. Or you got a soldier standing erect, brandishing a sword, made out of white marble. Or some kind of combination of both, made out of white marble.
Maya Ying Lin had sculpted a memorial that would change the paradigm of how we memorialized our fallen. But before it could be built, debate erupted throughout the country over the controversial nature of the design. There were no soldiers present, no horses, not even a canon, as was often seen in these types of monuments. It was remarkably simple – two black granite walls forming a vertex, sunk into the ground of the Mall, that would hold the names of all of the troops that had been killed in the war, not alphabetically, but chronologically.
Many people were aghast. They saw it as abhorrent and disrespectful, an insult to the deceased, a black gash upon the face of the capital. Large numbers of people, especially veterans, spoke out against it. In spite of the opposition, the three DC monuments committees that were required to review the project approved the design, with a small modification, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was built and dedicated on November 11, 1982. The wounds of the Vietnam War were still fresh enough that President Ronald Reagan did not even attend the dedication.
And these controversies did linger, until people came, and saw, and experienced the memorial in person. Because what they saw, was not disrespect to the fallen, or a scar on the face of the capital, but a respectful, moving and emotional monument to the 59,000 lost souls that possibly no other monument could have expressed so profoundly and successfully. You see, the sunken walls did not represent a gash but a depression, a metaphor for our gradual entry and sinking into a conflict that we were in over our heads before we realized it, and that we could only extricate ourselves gradually over time. And the names on the black granite walls follow our experience as we walk along and see the names multiply as we went deeper. But you don’t just see the names carved into the granite. The granite is polished to a mirror finish, so that you also see a reflection of yourself behind the names. The monument is also tactile, you want to touch it, touch the name of a lost loved one or colleague. And once you arrive at the apex of the walls, the lowest point, you can’t help but notice that the sounds from the surrounding city have become muffled, quiet. You are left to your own thoughts, to reflect on a war that no one seemed to want, but that we fought anyway.
The Vietnam Memorial has, in the years since, become an American icon, one of the most visited sites in the nation’s capital. It allowed us to finally find some level of closure for a war that divided our society like no other conflict since the Civil War. And that is the power of great design. Successful architecture, like most arts, can heal a community when created with care, attention to history and a conscious eye to our social conditions. With the right community input and well thought placement, architecture has a unique potential to bring a community together like no other medium because it is big, it takes up space to a greater extent than anything else you can create. You can occupy it, walk through it and experience it with multiple senses. It can take advantage of light and shadow, texture, sound, enclosure and temperature, to affect the visitor in profound ways and invoke emotional responses that virtually anyone cannot help but take with them. Memory may be the most powerful means of binding our society, and architecture, well designed, can provide the building blocks of that structure.
