Rajesh Punjabi 03812304 GR616 - Influences Maya Lin Maya Ying Lin, born on October 5th, 1959 in Ohio

after her parents immigrated to the US from China in 1949. Her father was a ceramist and a dean of the Ohio University College of Fine Arts. Believed to be the niece of Huiyin, the first female architect in China. Lin earned a Bachelors degree of Arts in 1981 from Yale University and a Master of Architecture degree in 1986. Lin currently works out her own design studio in New York City, and is to married Daniel Wolf, a photographer from New York. They have two children named India and Rachel. After growing up in Ohio, a place with few Asian people, Lin wanted to reconnect with her cultural backgrounds especially for her children. While attending Yale as an undergraduate, she won a design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that was completed in October 1982. The memorial is designed as a V shaped wall which had one side pointed at the Lincoln Memorial and the other pointed at the Washington Monument. The design was met with some controversy and opposition due to her Asian heritage. Lin has said that if the competition had not been blind, and if her name was on the design, then she would not have won due to her Asian name. She defended her design before the United States Congress and still only arranged a compromise in which a bronze statue of soldiers with an American Flag was placed to the side of the monument. She is responsible for the design of the Civil Rights Memorial in Alabama in 1989, and the Wave Field at the University of Michigan in 1995. In 2000, Lin released a book entitled Boundaries and also agreed to be the architect for the Confluence Project. This is the most extensive project she has undertaken, which involved the design of a historical installations along the Columbia and Snake Rivers in Washington and Oregon. Maya Lin was elected as the Alumni Fellow of the Yale Corporation in 2002 and the following year she served in the selection jury for the World Trade Center Site Memorial design competition. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Womens Hall of Fame in New York. Lin also designed a new plaza, at the University of California in Irvine, for the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. Commissioned by Ohio University, Lin designed an area of Bicentennial Park, called punchcard park, to look like a punch card. This design received criticisms for being uninviting and having punchcard pits which discourage certain recreation activities and created a mosquito infestation. In 2007, the American Institute of Architects ranked Lins Vietnam Veterans Memorial #10 on a list of Americas Favorite Architecture. That same year Lin installed an outdoor sculpture at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indiana entitled, Above and Below. Lin exhibited a 30- ton sculpture titled 2x4 Landscape at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, California. In 2008, Lin created the Pin River-Yangtze, a display of the Yangtze Rivers topography by using pins mounted on a wall, for the American Embassy in Beijing. On display behind the front desk of the Aria Resort & Casino, is Lins Silver River, an 84-foot cast of the Colorado River made of reclaimed Silver. Created in 2009, the sculpture is intended to make a statement about water conservation and its importance to the area. Maya Lin was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama that same year.