Maya ying lin vietnam veterans memorial 1981–1983

Vietnam Veterans Memorial, 1982
National Mall, Washington D.C.


Sponsor: Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund
Architect of Record: Cooper-Lecky Partnership
Landscape Architect: Henry Arnold
Photography: Terry Adams, Mark Segal, Victoria Sambunaris, Wendy Watriss

One of my classmates had seen a poster for a competition for the design of a Vietnam Veteran’s memorial, and since we had just completed an assignment for the design of a memorial to World War III, we chose to end the class with this project.

In researching for the WWIII assignment, I had noticed how war memorials often focused on the victor, rather than on the individual soldiers’ lives, until the memorials to World War I in Europe. Those monuments were created, listing all the names of soldiers lost in the battles.

The use of identification tags had not yet been introduced and with the onset of modern warfare, there was no way to recognize and identify so many of the soldiers, so many of the monuments were erected to the