![]() The design led Lin to work wave functions into other pieces: Flutter, an installation in progress in Miami, Florida, and Storm King, a wave field she's currently plotting for a 90,000-square-foot site in New York. Yet the wave formation responds to the intended function of the site: it incorporates concepts from physics and, of course, makes a good place for students to congregate. Neither is the site of The Wave Field itself perfectly "natural"-it's a plot of lawn sandwiched between campus buildings. With the fifty grassy "waves" occurring over eight rows, Lin draws from a perspective of nature that's not exactly naturalistic-she settled on the wave form after viewing satellite photography of the ocean-work made possible by the advances in air and space science. She renders physics-certainly the hard science fundamental in engineering-through the undulating waves.Īt the root of Lin's design is a naturally occurring oceanic wave phenomenon named after the physicist Sir George Gabriel Stokes. But Lin's also addressed a sort of social landscape by designing the piece to correspond with aerospace engineering concepts. There's obviously the physical landscape into which it's built, a 10,000-square-foot patch of earth. Lin is an environmental activist who was inspired early on by the Hopewell and Adena Native American burial mounds near her childhood home. Harvey's text makes thoughtful, relatable connections between Lin's work and the themes of her life an author's note adds supplementary details on the memorial's design and touches on Lin's later work.The Wave Field, completed by Maya Lin in 1995 for the University of Michigan, incorporates two landscapes. Maya Lin is an Asian-American artist, designer, and sculptor known for her architecture, environmental installations, and historical memorials. ![]() A wide double-page spread of the finished memorial, for instance, impressively captures its length as the wall of fallen solders' names stretches diagonally toward the horizon. Appropriately, the book's muted art has the fine lines, precision, and spatial astuteness of architectural drawings, and Phumiruk's use of perspective is often striking. That a twenty-one-year-old novice beat out 1,420 other candidates, many of them famous architects, is intrinsically captivating fodder for a picture book, and Lin's conviction about her own design in the face of public backlash is a built-in lesson in perseverance. During her senior year at Yale, Maya entered a national contest to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, inspired by its guideline that the design must blend with the park setting. She went on to study architecture, a fusion of "art, science, and math," in college. The daughter of two Chinese-immigrant artists, a potter and a poet who "never told Maya what to be or how to think," Maya honed both her creativity and her intellect as a child. In its early pages, this quiet and contemplative picture-book biography sets up artist-architect Maya Lin's fascination with spaces, natural and human-made, and their dynamic relationship with phenomena such as light. ![]() The soft color palette of the digital illustrations (made with scans of watercolors and textures) provides a complementary backdrop to the words, and Phumiruk ably conveys Lin's determination. Lin's story encourages the study of art, architecture, and engineering, making it an ideal choice to pair with STEAM-related activities. The simple yet lyrical narrative flows effortlessly and will not overwhelm young readers. Also addressed are the controversies that came with Lin being selected for this project, the opposition she faced, and the way she bravely stood her ground and championed her design and the reasoning behind it. Although the text does not delve deeply into all of the specifics of Lin's life, it imparts basic information about her childhood interest in art and architecture, describes her college studies to strengthen these skills, and explains how as a senior in college she entered a contest and came to create an iconic and poignant monument. This quietly inspiring title offers a biographical sketch of Maya Lin, the designer and architect behind Washington's Vietnam Veterans Memorial, completed in 1982. Gr 1–3-So often do we admire and revere our national monuments without giving much thought to those who conceptualized and created them. ![]()
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