When you were 19
I just read an interview of Peter Walker on the newest issue of ReadyMade magazine. Peter Walker is the landscape architect who won the competition to design the Sept 11 memorial on the grounds of the former World Trade Center. The article reminded me of my days as an architecture student.
As an architecture student, you learned by experiencing as much good building as possible. So one winter, I flied alone to Washington DC because I was about to start a project on designing a big museum, and Washington DC is probably the place where you'll find the highest concentration of large museum in North America. So for a few days, in the cold, I went to one museum after one museum, taking in as much as I can. I also bought my first digital camera for the trip, which is a Sony Mavica that used floppy disk for storage. It costed me US$700 and I still have it today.
Besides museums, the American capital also has a lot of monuments, so I also went to see those. One of the most striking ones is the Vietnam Veteran Memorials. You know how emotional Americans can get when they talk about the Vietnam war. So it is not an easy thing to design the Vietnam memorial. The memorial is a very simple black marble wall with a turn in the middle, with all the dead soldiers' names engraved on it. The experience of walking along that wall is overwhelming. It is so simple a design but so powerful.
The designer of that memorial is Maya Lin. When she won the competition to design that memorial, she was 19 years old.
What well do you understand the world you're living in (or anything) when you were 19?
And don't underestimate a 19 years old.
As an architecture student, you learned by experiencing as much good building as possible. So one winter, I flied alone to Washington DC because I was about to start a project on designing a big museum, and Washington DC is probably the place where you'll find the highest concentration of large museum in North America. So for a few days, in the cold, I went to one museum after one museum, taking in as much as I can. I also bought my first digital camera for the trip, which is a Sony Mavica that used floppy disk for storage. It costed me US$700 and I still have it today.
Besides museums, the American capital also has a lot of monuments, so I also went to see those. One of the most striking ones is the Vietnam Veteran Memorials. You know how emotional Americans can get when they talk about the Vietnam war. So it is not an easy thing to design the Vietnam memorial. The memorial is a very simple black marble wall with a turn in the middle, with all the dead soldiers' names engraved on it. The experience of walking along that wall is overwhelming. It is so simple a design but so powerful.
The designer of that memorial is Maya Lin. When she won the competition to design that memorial, she was 19 years old.
What well do you understand the world you're living in (or anything) when you were 19?
And don't underestimate a 19 years old.
Labels: Reflection
