Storm over a Viet Nam Memorial

By Wolf Von Eckardt

An eloquently simple design for Washington's Mall draws fire

Though Viet Nam veterans never got big parades, by next year they should at least be able to dedicate a memorial to their fallen comrades. But as with so much else touched by that tragic war, the memorial's eloquently understated design is stirring controversy.

Designated for a site on two acres of gently rolling park land on Washington's Mall, the monument will consist of two black granite walls that meet in a V and recede into the ground. One critic, Viet Nam Veteran Tom Carhart, calls it "a black gash of shame." The National Review labels it "Orwellian glop."

The winning design, picked from among 1,421 entries last May in a national competition, was submitted by a Chinese American, Maya Ying Lin, 22. "I've studied funerary architecture, the relation of architecture to death," says Lin. She has pointed the 200-ft.-long walls of her memorial west to the Lincoln Memorial and east to the Washington Monument. On those walls will be listed the names of the 57,709 Americans who died or were declared missing in Viet Nam. The names will appear in chronological, not alphabetical, order (another source of criticism). The roll begins on the right wall, with the name of the first American killed in Viet Nam, in 1961. It continues on the left and ends with the year 1975. Thus the first and last to die meet in the center and, as Lin puts it, "the war is 'complete,' coming full circle."

A lively, articulate woman who was born in Athens, Ohio, Lin graduated only last May from Yale, where she majored in architecture (and beat out one of her mentors in the Viet Nam competition). It was her concept, rather than her hazy pastel rendering of it, that won over the eight-man jury (four architects, three sculptors and one critic).

The first sour note to mar the initial symphony of praise came from Pulitzer prize-winning Architecture Critic Paul Gapp of the Chicago Tribune. "The so-called memorial," he wrote, is "bizarre" because it is "neither a building nor sculpture." But of course it is precisely those unclassifiable qualities that make Lin's design so eminently right. It fits. At this time in the history of our architecture, and at this place in the monumental heart of Washington, additional buildings or sculptures would intrude. In retrospect, it is hard to conceive of anything but a horizontal landscape design that could meet the criteria that the memorial be "neither too commanding nor too deferential."

This is confirmed by a look at some 50 of the other entries that will go on display next week at the American Institute of Architects headquarters in Washington. They illustrate our time's bewildering embrace of almost anything: from architectural stunts to sculptural theatrics, from the pompous to the ludicrous. from the innovative to the reactionary.

The rejected entries include such kitsch as a house-high steel helmet and a number of handsomely styled columns, pylons, tablets and structures that belong at a world's fair or amusement park. Oth er designs accommodate the thousands of names on various layouts of slabs, blocks and other geometric stones and look depressingly like constructivist graveyards.

The sculpture is mainly of the social ist realism school. Not that realism is un acceptable; we are rediscovering its value. The trouble is that no sculptor since Augustus Saint-Gaudens has been able to come up with a convincing metaphor that can be realistically rendered. The gods of Greek mythology have fled.

None of the runners-up, however sincerely conceived, deserves a place near the Lincoln Memorial. While there is nothing sacred about the Mall, the majesty of this green carpet demands digni fied simplicity, if not nobility, of any newcomer. Lin's design meets that demand.

That simplicity disturbs those who want a more assertive memorial. The National Review, calling for a sculpture, sees the black granite, sunken walls and unalphabetical roster as a conspiracy to dishonor the dead. Carhart, a Purple Heart winner who lost out in the design competition (he proposed a statue of an officer ' offering a dead soldier heavenward) says the jury should : have consisted of war veterans, as if a beauty contest should be judged only by beauties.

However heated the criticism has been of the Viet Nam veterans' dark chevron, it has been tepid compared with the storms that have raged over other public monuments. The Franklin D. Roosevelt memorial, approved in 1960 and still unbuilt, was smothered in epithets like "instant Stone-henge" and "bookends out of a deep freeze." Not until next spring, incredibly, will Washington get its first monument to General Pershing and the American Expeditionary Forces of World War I. Those bothered by abstract design might consider that grand obelisk, the Washing ton Monument. We have come to love it. Some day the Viet Nam memorial, too, may win the hearts and minds of the American people.

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