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Architecture is like a mythical fantastic. It has to be experienced. It can't be described. We can draw it up and we can make models of it, but it can only be experienced as a complete whole.

Maya Lin

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Maya Lin
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 5
Architect
Designer
Land Artist
Landscape Architect
Printmaker
Sculptor
Athens
Ohio
Maya Ying Lin
Like
Fantastic
Draw
Architecture
Mythical
Complete
Badass
Draws
Described
Models
Architect
Whole
Ass
Make
Experienced

More quotes by Maya Lin

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Even though I build buildings and I pursue my architecture, I pursue it as an artist. I deliberately keep a tiny studio. I don't want to be an architectural firm. I want to remain an artist.
Maya Lin
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When I was building the Vietnam Memorial, I never once asked the veterans what it was like in the war, because from my point of view, you don't pry into other people's business.
Maya Lin
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I always say I'm no different than a 19th-century landscape painter, it's just that we have these incredible tools to look at the Earth and look at the world around us differently.
Maya Lin
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I though about what death is, what a loss is. A sharp pain that lessens with time, but can never quite heal over. A scar. The idea occurred to me there on the site. Take a knife and cut open the earth, and with time the grass would heal it. As if you cut open the rock and polished it.
Maya Lin
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My parents are both college professors, and it made me want to question authority, standards and traditions.
Maya Lin
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My goal is to strip things down so that you need just the right amount of words or shape to convey what you need to convey. I like editing. I like it very tight.
Maya Lin
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I deliberately did not read anything about the Vietnam War because I felt the politics of the war eclipsed what happened to the veterans. The politics were irrelevant to what this memorial was.
Maya Lin
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For the most part things never get built the way they were drawn.
Maya Lin
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To fly, we have to have resistance. It's all about turbulence. Reacting to images of wave patterns in fluid motion.
Maya Lin
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I begin by imagining an artwork verbally. I try to describe in writing what the project is, what it is trying to do. I need to understand the artwork without giving it a specific materiality or solid form.
Maya Lin
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My dad was dean of fine arts at the university. I was casting bronzes in the school foundry. I was using the university as a playground.
Maya Lin
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To fly we have to have resistance.
Maya Lin
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I started studying what the nature of a monument is and what a monument should be. And for the World War III memorial I designed a futile, almost terrifying passage that ends nowhere.
Maya Lin
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The definition of a modern approach to war is the acknowledgement of individual lives lost.
Maya Lin
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If we forget what used to be, then we’ve lost an ability to really be sensitive to our surroundings.
Maya Lin
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We were unusually brought up there was no gender differentiation. I was never thought of as any less than my brother.
Maya Lin
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I also wanted remembering the past relevant to the present. Some people wanted me to put the names in alphabetical order. I wanted them in chronological order so that a veteran could find his time within the panel. It's like a thread of life.
Maya Lin
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I probably spent the first 20 years of my life wanting to be as American as possible. Through my 20s, and into my 30s, I began to become aware of how so much of my art and architecture has a decidedly Eastern character.
Maya Lin
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I was always making things. Even though art was what I did every day, it didn't even occur to me that I would be an artist.
Maya Lin
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It terrified me to have an idea that was solely mine to be no longer a part of my mind, but totally public.
Maya Lin