Making Memorials to the Future

Abstract

Abstract This article foregrounds the work of well-known American memorial architect, Maya Lin. She does not figure in International Relations (IR) knowledge lists, yet started her career by looking back at the American War in Vietnam from the perspective of a forward-looking aesthetic that wins the competition for a memorial in Washington, DC. Later, Lin launches future-oriented memorials that commemorate natural abundance increasingly threatened by that most dangerous war taking place against the planet. Like others contributing to making an academic field and political practice by thinking differently, I take my bearings these days from aesthetic journeys, in my case, to edgy war memorials first, and then to gentle landscape architectures that praise or kill no one, offer no massive focal point or built structure to interpret, and have no particular shooting war to commemorate. Both put viewers into disrupted present times that speak to concerns that could make fruitful futures.