The Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. -- designed by Yale trustee Maya Lin '81, '86 M.Arch. -- has received the 2007 Twenty-Five Year Award from the American Institute of Architecture (AIA).
The award is conferred annually on a design of "enduring significance ... that has stood the test of time for 25 to 35 years."
Lin, an internationally known architect and sculptor, was a senior at Yale College in 1981 when she entered a public design competition for a memorial to the servicemen and women who had died or gone missing in Vietnam. Her design for a granite V-shaped wall etched with the names of the 58,000 Americans who had fallen in the Vietnam War was chosen from 1,421 submissions.
When it opened to the public in 1982, the Memorial Wall met with some hostility for its simplicity and perceived understatement. Nonetheless, the burnished black granite structure, which rises out of the earth pointing east to the Washington Monument and west to the Lincoln Memorial, won critical acclaim. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on the day of its dedication, and in 1984 received the National AIA Honor Award for Architecture. Today, the monument attracts more sightseers than any other building or landmark in the nation's capital, and it is widely recognized as a national treasure.
In a letter nominating the Vietnam Memorial, Louis R. Pounders, chair of the Twenty-Five Year Award Committee, wrote: "The Memorial is a message to all visitors about the horrendous loss of war, the tragic cost of conflict. It is a message that is timeless."
Last year, the Twenty-Five Year Award went to the Yale Center for British Art, Louis I. Kahn's last project to be built in his lifetime. Kahn's first building project, the Yale University Art Gallery, was the recipient of the award in 1979. Three other projects by Kahn, who taught at Yale for 10 years in the late 1940s and 1950s, also received the Twenty-Five Year Award. In addition, Eero Saarinen, who graduated from Yale in 1934 and designed the Ingalls Hockey Rink and the Morse and Ezra Stiles residential college complex, received the same honor from the AIA for six of his projects.
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