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shape that an architect or an artist can imagine, so why not a vividly colored mael-strom of shapes? The task of the architect would be to make such space livable while affirming the power of art to break existing molds.

One woman who has consistently challenged the barriers that exist between the art world and architecture is Maya Lin. Now thirty-six years old, she was only twentyone, an architectural student at Yale, when she submitted the winning design for the Vietnam Veterans Memoriał in Washington. This V-shaped wedge of black granite is cut into the earth of the Mail, not far from the Washington Monument. On it, in the order of their death, are inscribed the names of the 57,000 Americans who lost their lives in Vietnam. The London daily The Independent called Maya Lin's work 'the greatest of all modern monuments... this relentless stretch of lustrous black granite that recalls the name of every poor Jack who died need-

lessly fighting for a political concept - the domino theory - that existed openly in the minds of paranoid, vote-conscious politicians. When you see grown men, who have coursed the heart of darkness in order to indulge the whim of a social elite, tracę out the incised names of their comrades, beat Lin's walls with their fists and ery hot tears, you feel instinctively why so many monuments mean nothing to most ordinary people."”

It was after designing this seminal monument, visited by morę than 2.5 million people each year, that Maya Lin went to graduate school to become an architect. There she encountered one professor who was to have a considerable influence on her. "Frank O. Gehry was very supportive when I was in graduate school," she says. "Frank was a teacher, and when I told him that instead of drawing up a design I wanted to collaborate with a sculptor and build something, he said, 'Great, go

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