The Art Of Honoring The Dead

When Maya Lin was a 21-year-old Yale undergraduate, she beat out 1,420 other entrants in a blind competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial--a design that changed forever the way we think about commemoration. Now based in New York City, where she works as an architect and a sculptor, Lin doubts she'll compete to design the memorial for the World Trade Center, though she's given advice when asked. "All I've said so far is that I've gone through a certain experience, and if that experience will help, I'm here," she says. Her key words of wisdom: slow down. "We rush very quickly to memorialize things," says Lin. "I think the passage of time helps." One idea she feels strongly about: leaving the Twin Towers' footprints as reflecting pools. Here Lin talks about some other memorials and why they work.

Remembering the Holocaust: Strength in Silence

Rachel Whiteread's memorial for victims of the Holocaust in Vienna is very responsive to the site. It's a cast of the inside part of a library, so it's all about silence and muteness, which is what happened. It's just an intensely powerful negation. That memorial, the Irish Hunger Memorial [by Brian Tolle in New York City] and the proposed memorial in Hyde Park for Princess Diana [by American landscape artist Kathryn Gustafson and London architect Neil Porter]-all three are very different, and each is original. You don't want to accept what you've seen before; you want something unique. My belief has always been to bring people to a place, give them the facts of history, but then you have to give over the piece--it is each visitor who must internalize it and make it personal."

Memorial as Journey

Some memorials are journeys or passages. At Edwin Lutyens's Memorial to the Missing of the Somme in France, you walk across a serene grassy plain. You're almost trespassing. You go toward a huge gaping arch, like a scream, and as you walk into it, you're surrounded by names of the missing, thousands of names. You pass through, and look out at another grassy plain--but this one is filled with crosses. It's a journey to an awareness of immense loss. Then you turn and go back--so there's that separation between the living and the dead."

The Magic of the Makeshift

The spontaneity after 9-11 was incredibly moving, the shrines around the firehouses and Union Square in Manhattan [above], or anywhere people left tributes. One of the hardest things to see were the missing posters that just sprang up all over the city. Every time you saw them, you were in tears. But if someone tried to re-create those places, it would become a totally different experience. They would lose their power, because what they had was the spontaneity of raw, pure emotion."