Maya Lin, who was catapulted to prominence in 1981 after winning the competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington while still a Yale undergraduate, has spent the last decade or so expanding the scope of her work to include architecture and sculpture to go with a handful of public-art installations.
Just as important, she has been waging -- in her quiet, spotlight-averse way -- a one-woman campaign against the growing glitz and profit-driven showmanship of the architecture and design field.
Her new Arts Plaza for UC Irvine's Claire Trevor School of the Arts, scheduled to be officially unveiled in a public ceremony this afternoon, is typical of the ammunition Lin, 46, prefers to use in that fight: It is designed to reward careful attention, and to assert its muted strength by degrees and over time. Still, there is such a thing as too much restraint, and this design finds Lin occasionally skirting the line that divides the quietly profound from the banal.
Commissioned in 2000 and ultimately built for $3.6 million, the project is an attempt by UC Irvine to take a group of forgettable, concrete-lined walkways between the buildings that house its various arts programs and turn them into a gathering space -- and a modestly sized outdoor performance venue.
Irvine also hopes it will boost the School of the Arts' sense of identity and by extension provide a new center of gravity on the north side of campus. For the most part, only sections of the Irvine campus near circular Aldrich Park, around which the entire university plan is organized, have seemed central.
It is too bad that the commission didn't include the chance for Lin, who is beginning to find her voice as an architect, to design a free-standing building. In a public plaza and skating rink that opened in 2001 in downtown Grand Rapids, Mich. -- a project Lin named "Ecliptic" -- she added concrete outbuildings that despite their modest scale help give the space as a whole a visual coherence. She has also designed a library and an adjacent chapel for the Children's Defense Fund in Clinton, Tenn., along with a small number of apartments and houses.
But there was no room here for a new building, however small. Instead, Irvine asked Lin -- whose father served as dean of fine arts at Ohio University when she was a child, making this project particularly attractive to her -- to squeeze a new plaza into the space between existing academic and performance halls, a campus art gallery and a cafe.
