COMMENTS: Architectural Politics: The Vietnam Memorial

...But to dwell on the limits of his sculpture, let alone exaggerate them, is to repeat the worst mistakes the antiwar movement made between 1965 and 1975, when, despite the rightness of its position, it managed to isolate itself from the country as a whole...

...To its critics the new memorial is not merely bad architecture...

...You cannot in the end make out a name without also finding your own face—and usually the sky and clouds—reflected back...

...Unfortunately, each side has managed to distort the other's position and then had its charges further sensationalized by such newspaper reports as Tom Wolfe's "The Battle of the Vietnam Memorial...

...But what distinguishes the debate over the Vietnam Veterans Memorial from these earlier controversies are the passions it has aroused...

...They appear weighted down by the guns and ammunition they carry, and what comes through, as Hart himself has pointed out, are their bonds of love "in the face of their aloneness and vulnerability...

...First, the names of the 57,939 Americans who had died or who were reported missing in Vietnam had to be contained within the memorial...

...The result is a compromise both sides have qualms about, and in the last 18 months the debate over the two memorials has constantly sounded like a 1980s version of the 1960s arguments over the war itself...

...To be loyal to the architecture of the memorial is never to turn away from the dead it mourns...

...But the closer you get, the more distinct the names and mirrorlike the wall...

...IN THE CASE of Maya Lin's memorial the criticism is especially distorting...

...By now it was clear that approval for the memorial was not going to come about without major compromise...

...Ross Perot, after contributing $160,000 toward construction of the memorial, produced a poll of 587 ex-POWs in which a majority were said to oppose Lin's design, and on Capitol Hill, ex-POW Senator Jeremiah Denton (R.—Ala...

...Its subject was unmistakable: three soldiers, one black and two white, bound together in a mixture of camaraderie and exhaustion...

...It is a "black gash" of shame, "a tribute to Jane Fonda," as Tom Wolfe wrote in a Washington Post article attacking the memorial as an enormous pit...

...What Maya Lin has done for the memory of those who were killed in Vietnam, Hart has attempted to do for those who survived the war...

...It is no accident that on Veterans Day in 1983, when the memorial was unveiled, there was such an outpouring of emotion from those who had come to Washington for the ceremony...

...Despite their muscularity and combat gear, Hart's three soldiers are not glorified and certainly not triumphant...

...It raises questions, as no public building of the last decade has, about the role of modern architecture in American life...

...For the chronology of the dead and missing resumes on the left wall of the v, and in the end you are brought back to the deepest part of the monument, where the names of the dead and missing first appeared...

...The memorial, whose walls are angled so that they point to the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, is designed to involve the viewer with both the Vietnam dead and American history...

...The locator book is like a telephone directory for a city of the dead, and what it reminds us of by the very pause it gives is the collective toll of Vietnam...

...Her Vietnam Memorial carries with it none of the sardonic antiwar sentiment we find in such contemporary art as Ed Kienholz's "The Portable War Memorial" or Claes Oldenburg's polemical fantasy "Proposed Monument for the Intersection of Canal Street and Broadway...

...The rules of the competition she won have not been followed, and the changes that have come about since then have occurred because the opponents of Lin's design had more political muscle than the jury that approved it...

...Hart's memorial is not a 1980s version of the Marine Corps Monument with its bronze soldiers triumphantly raising the American flag over Iwo Jima...

...Maya Lin's walls are in the funerary tradition that explains Memorial Hall at Harvard, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Arlington, the Navy-Marine Memorial in Washington...

...A veteran himself, Scruggs began the VVMF with the idea of erecting a monument to those who had died in Vietnam...

...There, on the right side of the apex, appear the names of the first men to die in the war, and then in chronological order as the wall recedes into the earth the names of more dead and missing...

...But even this cumbersome process is moving...

...In July they settled on Frederick Hart, a third-place winner in the original memorial competition...

...In January 1982 the debate moved to Congress, where an ad hoc committee chaired by Senator John Warner (R.—Va...

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...Where Lin's memorial had been abstract, Hart's was strikingly realistic...

...The seed money for the contest was provided by Texas computer millionaire H. Ross Perot, and an eight-man jury, consisting of sculptors, architects, landscape architects, and a design critic, was instructed to insist on only two requirements in any design it chose...

...The Washington Monument, commissioned in 1783 by the Continental Congress, was not finished until 1884 because of arguments over its form, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial, which was approved in 1960, remains unbuilt today because of dissatisfaction with its design...

...What followed was a deal intended to appease both sides...

...Second, the memorial had to reflect the fact that its location in the Constitution Gardens would place it between the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial...

...In a recent interview she would recall, "I honestly don't have thoughts on the war," but "I remember my father never letting me out of the house during the [antidraft] riots, because I was in a university town...

...Maya Lin's memorial, scheduled for groundbreaking in March, was To Our Contributors • When sending manuscripts, please make sure that you do not send your only copy...

...In October 1981 Tom Carhart, a member of the VVMF and a losing entrant in the memorial competition, appeared before the Commission of Fine Arts, charging Lin's design with being a "degrading ditch" designed to honor the war at home, and soon after his appearance, the anti-Lin arguments began to escalate...

...At this point the VVMF moved on to its next task, choosing the design for the memorial...

...threw his weight behind the antimemorial forces...

...The jurors' approval of Maya Lin's design was unanimous, but the austerity of her memorial and Maya Lin herself (a 21-year-old woman with ChineseAmerican parents, who had conceived of her winning design in a course on funerary art) guaranteed controversy...

...And please also be sure to enclose a stamped, selfaddressed envelope...

...They are much too complicated for such reductive labels...

...Instead, you find your reflection mingling with their names, and the names, despite their placement below the ground, always pointing to more dead...

...But to leave the memorial by following the names and moving away from its deepest point is not to abandon the dead...

...Under these circumstances it is understandable why Maya Lin should feel badly treated and in a letter to the VVMF describe Hart's statue (which will be placed 120 feet from the entrance to the memorial) as an "intrusion...

...In a war of unheroic iconography— the ditch at My Lai, the burning of the village of Cam Ne, the evacuation of Saigon— Hart's statue captures the one value that sustained soldiers throughout Vietnam: loyalty to each other...

...was formed to work out a settlement...

...If friends or family want to find a particular soldier, they must go to one of the memorial's guides, who carries with him a huge alphabetized book that gives the location of each soldier's name...

...It appears as a rift in the earth, a long v-shaped wall of polished black granite, emerging from and receding back into the earth...

...To get close to the memorial means, however, not merely viewing it from a distance of a few feet but descending down a walk, which leads to its apex ten feet below the surface of the ground behind it...

...From a distance it is impossible to make out the names carved on each of the 250-foot 25 walls...

...In April 1982 a panel consisting entirely of Vietnam veterans was chosen by the VVMF to select an artist to do the sculpture...

...The biggest surprise, however, was not the high number of entries but the winning design: a minimalist sculpture-earthwork by Maya Ying Lin, a Yale undergraduate, who was a child when the Vietnam War began...

...To make sure the results would be of the highest quality, the VVMF opted for a juried competition open to all American citizens over the age of 18...

...The truth of the matter is that, despite the symbolism they have acquired, the two memorials do not represent a struggle between elite and populist art, on the one hand, and antiwar and prowar sentiments on the other...

...The problem is that to write off Hart's statue as an intrusion or to see it, as New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger does, as "converting a superb design into something that speaks of heroism and of absolute moral certainty" is to overlook what Hart has done and the need his "vets" speak to...

...0 approved, but in turn her opponents were granted what they wanted: the right to have a flag pole and an alternative sculpture placed in the Constitutional Gardens...

...That in the end his effort has not been equal to her masterpiece is worth noting...

...Their central focus is the dead, not the aims of the war in which the dead lost their lives...

...In late 1979 legislation was introduced in Congress allocating land for the memorial, and in 1980 the project was signed into law by President Carter...

...The competition, which began in October 1980, 24 received 1,421 entries...

...From this point on, the project, which needed approval from the National Capital Planning Commission, the Commission of Fine Arts, and the Department of the Interior, was in trouble...

...And beyond that, it asks whether we, as a nation, are capable of honoring the men who died in Vietnam while refusing to honor the war they fought...

...Gauden's Civil War Memorial of Colonel Robert Shaw and his black troops, but in 1984 Lowell's lines are equally appropriate to the newly erected Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C...

...The story of how the memorial became the focus of such controversy begins in 1979 with Jan Scruggs and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF...

...For if Lin's memorial asks whether we are prepared to honor those who died in Vietnam while refusing to honor the war they fought, Hart's statue raises a more immediate and human question: Are we prepared to honor those soldiers who survived Vietnam while refusing to honor the war they fought...

...In a city dominated by white marble monuments built on a heroic scale, the Vietnam Memorial, with its black granite walls that never rise above ground level, defies expectation...

...Monument controversies are nothing new in the capital...

...The maquette of Hart's statue, unveiled in September, showed it to be strikingly different in concept from Lin's memorial...

...The monument was, as a VVMF press release stated, to be funded by private rather than government sources and to make no political statement...