Vincent J. Scully, Jr.

Sterling Professor Emeritus of the History of Art, Yale University and Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Miami

 

Remarks at the 2007 Accent on Architecture Gala

introducing
The American Institute of Architects Twenty-five Year Award: Vietnam Veterans Memorial

It's an honor to be here on this occasion.

For much too long, the veterans of Vietnam were somehow made to bear the onus of an ugly war. They were doubly scape goats: first for a nation’s conscience which believed that evil had been done in its name, and second for patriotic anger because the war had not been won. That’s the way it was until the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial took shape on Washington’s Mall. It was that memorial, designed, beyond all possible expectation, by a 21-year-old senior in Yale College, named Maya Lin, that opened America’s heart to the dead, and the survivors, of that war and drew them back into the national community once more. So much from a work of art: a kind of miracle, recalling the great legends of ages long gone by.

As we all know, the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial was the result of a people’s movement with which the government had little to do. It was a private organization of veterans who determined to build a memorial and chose Maya Lin’s design out of hundreds, and withstood the vicious personal attacks to which they and Maya were subjected, and saw their brave project through to completion at last. At the sometimes savage public hearings that were involved Maya wore a pork pie hat with a wide brim like Frank Lloyd Wright’s, perhaps to invoke some of his divine audacity and to conceal from her enemies the hurt in her eyes.

It’s not too much to say that her critics have been utterly confounded. Her memorial has become the fundamental American monument of the second half of the twentieth century, joining two of the country’s greatest symbols, to which, in fact, its perspectives direct our eyes: the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument.

Like them it is a place of popular pilgrimage, beloved by the public, and even more than the others the subject of a people’s myths and of their art. The popular image that we see everywhere, of a visitor touching the wall and seeing instead of his own reflection a soldier coming up to touch his hand out of the darkness, exactly describes the reconciliation of the living with the dead that the wall achieves.

The veterans know this: they also recognize the fundamental truth of the wall beyond the usual rhetoric of memorials. It does not glorify or exalt. It neither apportions guilt nor claims victory. It simply affirms the massive fact, far more cogent than any political idea, of being there and dying there. Of being in one’s place with one’s people. So brilliant of Maya Lin to insist against all mature advice that the names of the dead should be chronological, not alphabetical, in sequence. Now their survivors find them where and when they died, and alongside the people they died with.

Into that majestic conception Maya poured her knowledge of the great landscape architecture of the past, of the thin, stretched surfaces of Vaux-le-Vicomte, Chantilly, and Versailles, and of the thousands of names on Sir Edwin Lutyens’ transcendent memorial to the dead of the Somme at Thiepval, but she transformed it all with her own piercing vision of the wall of the dead rising dark and shining from the ground.

At the same time the Memorial most gently defers to the great axis of the Mall itself and to the old monuments upon it. Still, it changes everything, and links them with each other in a new way, built out of the special experience of these times and this war: a consummate work of modern art. It was Hemingway who wrote, angrily, that the old rhetoric no longer worked and only names and numbers counted any more. Here, without comment, the names of more than 58,000 dead are strung along a wall, integral to this place but suggesting anywhere. The wall is everything; it is the last place. We put our backs to it in the end. Here, Maya tells us, it is “ ... the interface between the sunny world and the quiet, dark world beyond that we can’t enter..." It leads us down into the depths of the war, where the names crowd in, then slowly up out of it, where they dwindle away, releasing us at last to Washington’s obelisk and the open sky.