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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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Maya Lin
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: October 5
Architect
Designer
Land Artist
Landscape Architect
Printmaker
Sculptor
Athens
Ohio
Maya Ying Lin
Authority
Parents
College
Question
Parent
Traditions
Artist
Professors
Made
Standards
Tradition

More quotes by Maya Lin

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You couldn't put me in a social group setting. I'm probably a terrible anarchist deep down.
Maya Lin
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Sometimes I think creativity is magic it's not a matter of finding an idea, but allowing the idea to find you.
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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I'm as much interested in the form-making as well as getting you to think about what we're doing to the world around us.
Maya Lin
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I saw the Vietnam Veterans Memorial not as an object placed into the earth but as a cut in the earth that has then been polished, like a geode. Interest in the land and concern about how we are polluting the air and water of the planet are what make me want to travel back in geologic time-to witness the shaping of the earth before man.
Maya Lin
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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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Some of your teachers are actually closer in age to you than you think.
Maya Lin
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It's funny, as you live through something you're not aware of it.
Maya Lin
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I had very few friends. We always ate dinner with our parents. We didn't want to go out. American adolescence was a lot wilder than I would have felt comfortable with.
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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A lot of my works deal with a passage, which is about time. I don't see anything that I do as a static object in space. It has to exist as a journey in time.
Maya Lin
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I left science, then I went into art, but I approach things very analytically. I choose to pursue both art and architecture as completely separate fields rather than merging them.
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 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 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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The role of art in society differs for every artist.
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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I really enjoyed hanging out with some of the teachers. This one chemistry teacher, she liked hanging out. I liked making explosives. We would stay after school and blow things up.
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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Sometimes you have to stop thinking. Sometimes you shut down completely. I think that's true in any creative field.
Maya Lin