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For a park in downtown Grand Rapids, Maya Lin sculpts an urban space.
By Christopher Hawthorne
March 2002
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Concentric rings of seating surround the ice-skating rink at Lin's
Ecliptic park (2001)--her first project incorporating art and
architecture in one site--in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The rings create
an optical illusion in which their slight slope also makes the surface
of the rink appear to tilt with the earth's curvature.
Photos: Left, courtesy Maya Lin Studio; right, Walter Smith
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It's too soon to say with any certainty how last fall's terrorist attacks
and a sputtering economy might conspire to change the tone and output of
American culture. There have already been pronouncements on that score that
seemed premature or silly--like the idea that irony is dead or that Hollywood
executives might permanently banish fireballs and car wrecks and plots
involving bearded terrorists. But it's safe to say that there's a growing
desire--not begun, perhaps, but deepened by the attacks and their aftermath--for
works of art and culture that are more modest than garish, that trade the
easy showmanship and high-end retail glitz prevalent at the end of the 1990s
for something more deeply human.
And if we want to go so far as to call that desire a new cultural sensibility,
there's no figure in the design world who embodies it more naturally
than Maya Lin. In the two decades since she won an international competition
to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington as a 21-year-old Yale
senior, Lin has quietly produced a body of work that ranges from sculpture
and furniture design to architecture and installation art. (She's also completed
two more memorials, though she now claims to have "retired" from
the monument-design business.) All of her work blends Asian and Western
influences into a whole that is muted, even minimalist, but conceptually
rigorous.
The 42-year-old Lin has just finished a win-ter garden for the American
Express building in Minneapolis, and currently she's working on a variety
of projects: a house in the Napa Valley; an ark-shaped chapel for the Children's
Defense Fund in Clinton, Tennessee; a park for the campus of Ohio University
in her hometown of Athens; a plaza for the University of California, Irvine;
and a show of sculptures and other artworks that will be held, once Lin
finds time to get them done, at the Gagosian Gallery in New York.
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Three Stages Of Water
Water is the park's theme (inspired by the city's name), and it is
featured in all three states: in the ice-skating rink (bottom), a water
fountain (top right), and a vapor fountain (top left).
Photos: Bottom, Bill Herbert, courtesy Frey Foundation; top right & top left, Balthazar Korab
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Lin's architecture, some of which is boxy and Modernist, looks very different
from her spare, curvilinear public sculpture and landscape design, and differs
from her artworks, which include explorations of topography, the phases
of the moon, and other natural forms. "I like keeping the three areas
of work separate," Lin told me when I visited her studio in Soho, a
bright, modest space overlooking the boutiques of Prince Street that she
shares with four young staffers and two cats. Lin, who has an open, practically
unlined face, was wearing a white T-shirt under a black zippered sweater,
and olive-colored pants. Her black hair, as usual, was cut in a simple bob.
As soon as I walked in the door--before I could even turn on my tape recorder,
in fact--she'd begun talking about her work in a manner that was passionate
without being excitable and was empty of theoretical jargon. Every once
in a while she had trouble explaining something to me in a way that satisfied
her, so one of her assistants would rummage around in the back of the studio
before producing a model or an architectural plan that Lin used to make
or extend a point.
Mostly, Lin explained, the separation that she maintains between genres
gives her office a structural stability and allows her to keep tight
artistic control over everything that comes out of it. It also provides
her a kind of respite: If she starts to feel overwhelmed by the architectural
design process or frustrated by the compromises it requires, for example,
she can retreat to the solitary work of producing art. "I'm a very
small studio, and I'd like to stay that way," Lin said. "I'm not
a manager. I just want to be the artist here." She said she could never
"hang out a shingle" and actively solicit work because it would
flood the office with unwanted projects, wrecking that careful
balance between the art and architecture.
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Fiber-optic lights (above) beneath the ice, created in collaboration
with lighting designer Linnaea Tillett, match the pattern of the
constellations on January 1, 2000, the year the design was created. Lin
imagined the rink as a pond reflecting the night sky.
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During warm months, the rink serves as an amphitheater (above) for
public performances.
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Quennell Rothschild & Partners assisted with the landscaping
(above), which Lin considers part of the art. For instance, rolling
waves of grass between the two fountains suggest water in its liquid
state.
Photos: Top & bottom, Maya Lin Studio; center, Blathazar Korab
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Yet in one of her most recently completed commissions, a park for Grand
Rapids, Michigan, she unwittingly broke some of her own rules and wound
up combining most of her skills in a single scheme. The park was formally
dedicated last September as Ecliptic at Rosa Parks Circle (Lin came up with
the first name, and city officials later added the nod to the
civil rights pioneer). The heart of it is a skating rink that converts into
an amphitheater in the warmer months and is lit by tiny fiber-optic
lights, which are embedded in its surface and laid out in a pattern representing
a constellation of stars. Lin also designed two small service buildings
in steel and concrete, a pair of fountains, and short, wandering paths through
landscaped mounds of grass that rise and fall in waves about three feet
high.
The park is public space in the old-fashioned sense of the term. Nearly
all of the activities that take place there, from skating in the winter
to concerts in the summer, are free. Its design does not catch your eye--your
eye has to catch it. Particularly when the rink is empty and the birch trees
that dot its edges are bare, the park can be subtle to the point of transparency.
But given the difficulties of combining sculpture, architecture, and
urban design at a constricted downtown site, Lin says it's easily the most
complicated project she's yet undertaken.
They call Grand Rapids "Sculpture City." The nickname comes, primarily,
from its residents' fondness for the artwork that Alexander Calder designed
for the plaza in front of Grand Rapids' Miesian city hall building in 1969.
Calder, an American who spent his entire adult life in France, named the
sculpture La Grande Vitesse--which is French, more or less, for Grand
Rapids. It was paid for in part by a $100,000 grant from the National Endowment
for the Arts, the first such grant ever given for outdoor sculpture.
When the piece--at 42 tons one of the largest of Calder's career--was unveiled,
the reaction from the locals was decidedly negative. They had been expecting
something triumphantly figurative, and what they got was abstract,
angular, and challenging. According to the mayor, the sculpture had been
shipped over from France on a freighter, in boxes labeled "scrap steel,"
and many people complained that's all it was--heavy, expensive piles of
metal, colored an alarmingly bright shade that is now known in paint stores
across the country as Calder Red.
But since that time the people of Grand Rapids--the second largest city
in Michigan, with a population of about 200,000--have come to love the sculpture
and identify closely with it. Its silhouette has become the de facto city
logo, appearing on municipal letterhead and on the side of its garbage trucks.
Mayor John H. Logie wears a miniature version of the sculpture on the lapel
of his suit jacket. These days it goes right below his American flag
pin.
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