Description
Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington D.C. (dedicated November 1982), a V-shaped wall of polished black Indian granite inscribed with the names of 58,318 service members who died or went missing during the Vietnam War. Lin designed it in 1981 at age 21 as a Yale undergraduate, winning a blind competition with 1,421 entries. The names are listed chronologically by date of casualty rather than alphabetically, so the wall becomes a timeline of loss. Its reflective surface shows visitors their own faces among the names. The current count is 58,318 (originally 57,939, with names added as people died from war-related causes). As data visualization, it represents the most powerful list ever carved in stone — where the data is the names of the dead.
