Vietnam Veterans Memorial

A stark, unornamented wall of names that broke every rule of heroic war memorial design — and, in doing so, became one of the most visited and emotionally powerful memorials in the world.

Vietnam veteran Jan Scruggs founded the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund in 1979 to build a memorial to those killed or missing in the war, and Congress authorized a site on the National Mall the following year. A blind national design competition drew 1,421 anonymous entries, and in 1981 the jury selected a spare design of two black granite walls submitted by Maya Lin, then a 21-year-old undergraduate architecture student at Yale, whose identity was unknown to the judges until after her design won.

Lin's design sank two 246-foot-long polished granite walls into the earth, meeting at a 125-degree angle and pointing toward the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument. Rather than heroic statuary, the walls simply list the names of more than 58,000 American service members killed or missing in Vietnam, ordered chronologically by casualty date so that veterans could find comrades who fell together. The memorial was dedicated on November 13, 1982.

The design's radical minimalism proved controversial: some veterans and critics, expecting a traditional heroic monument, derided it before it was even built. As a compromise, a bronze statue of three servicemen by Frederick Hart was added nearby in 1984, and the Vietnam Women's Memorial, honoring the women — mostly nurses — who served, was dedicated in 1993. Names continue to be added to the wall as further deaths and missing service members are confirmed.