I first visited this memorial over 15 years ago, and later became enamored with Maya Lin as an Asian American architect. I found her words and work compelling, and the subtleties in this monument and its experience left a huge impact on me.
Architects are trained to tell stories with space, and to design experiences for the physical self to embody. I may not be as enamored with Maya Lin after studying and practicing architecture, but the sentiment of her proposal still impresses me.
How can we evoke feeling in others despite having different lived experience?
I am thinking about what I want to make for the final assignment, starting with the feelings I want to evoke. I've been uncharacteristically fragile this past month, with many feelings of sadness, slowness, regret, confusion, stress, etc. So this is the pool of feelings that I have to choose from!
I am thinking about making a hanging scale, perfectly balanced in the air. Give two people a handful of random small trinkets. They must take turns adding objects into the buckets on the scale. As they add objects, the scale becomes imbalanced. Can these two participants work together to bring the scale back to equilibrium?