![]() “If I work on the project, you’ll get me ,” she says. She shows me her hands, and I can barely make out the pattern of spirals on her fingers. She believes working so much with Plasticine may have flattened the ridges on her fingertips. A couple of years ago, she was traveling with her family and had a hard time getting her fingerprints to read at an airport checkpoint. She won’t take on architectural commissions that contribute to urban sprawl, and while her work often requires the enlistment of teams of designers, builders, fabricators, engineers, landscapers, computer scientists, and specialists to bring it to life, she is integrally involved in everything. But I’m not.’ ”įor the most part, Lin has been able to pick and choose the kinds of projects she wants to do. “So I really hope I’ve been able to say, ‘Here’s my work. “You owe it to the project,” she explains. But she also understands why speaking about her work is important, especially to the nonprofits and institutions with which she often collaborates. Despite, or perhaps because of, that early exposure, Lin has always drawn a strict line around her private life. She eventually had to testify in front of a Senate subcommittee to defend her design. The controversy that surrounded the memorial, with some veterans objecting to Lin-young, female, Chinese American-as its creator, left her wary of attention. Ghost Forest (2021) in Madison Square Park in New York. “It was the best year and the worst year of my life.” A comprehensive exhibition on Lin’s life that opened last year at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington was also in the works-the first the museum had ever devoted to an Asian American person. (Lin restored it and added a pair of elegant, window-filled extensions on either side.) Then there was her Ghost Forest installation in New York’s Madison Square Park that May, which involved transporting 49 leafless Atlantic-white-cedar trees from a dying grove in the New Jersey Pine Barrens decimated by the effects of climate change and placing them in the public space. First, there was the unveiling in March 2021 of her redesign of the Neilson Library at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, a building constructed in 1909 with a traditional brick facade that was obfuscated by later expansions. Wolf’s death came at what was supposed to be a celebratory moment for Lin, whose memorials, buildings, landscapes, sculptures, and mixed-media and conceptual works have explored our relationships with nature, memory, the environment, and the spaces we create and occupy. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial (1982), which Lin designed, on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. When the subject comes up, Lin’s face, at first gracious and warm, stiffens briefly into a mask. The couple had been married for almost 25 years. The family, which includes their two daughters, India and Rachel, had all been together at their house in Ridgway, Colorado, when it happened. In January of 2021, Wolf died suddenly, at the age of 65, after suffering a heart attack. She has her studio downtown, of course, where she employs a handful of people, and not too long ago she took over the downstairs office of her late husband, the art dealer and collector Daniel Wolf, renowned for the world-class collection of photography he assembled for the J. There and on airplanes, where she feels slightly out of reach from life’s demands. She always has-ever since she was catapulted to fame in 1981 as a 21-year-old architecture student at Yale, when the design she created in her dorm room was selected from 1,421 submissions for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Lin likes working from her bedroom, which is just down the hall. Lin recently adopted a nine-month-old mini-Aussie puppy named Sable, who circles us before scampering inside. Dressed in jeans and a brown shirt, she ushers me outside to her rooftop terrace, where an array of potted plants lends a lush calm to the frenetic energy of the city below. At five foot three, with her signature long bob, Lin, now 64, is slight, with an affable demeanor and a surprisingly low voice. One morning in September, Maya Lin welcomes me into her apartment, a series of merged units with Gothic-style windows near Central Park in New York City.
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