Maya Lin explained the thought processes behind much of her art. In particular the memorials (she has also done the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery Alabama and the Women's Table at Yale, among others). Her method is to steep herself in the story and to visit the site to imagine how the message of the memorial can be presented. Her first sketch (often) is text. An essay. Describing the work in natural language before deciding its shape and form. At some point, she seemed to say, the image of the work springs to mind more or less fully formed. Lots of detailed work remains, but the architecture of the artifact appears to her all at once. This is interesting, and not what I expected to hear.
My interest in hearing her talk was primarily because of the geometrical aspects of her work. I had seen Wave Field (shown above) literally a lawn outside an Engineering building at the University of Michigan in the shape of waves on a theoretically-perfect surface. Maya Lin explains that the wave shape was one she found in a textbook of Aeronautical Engineering (the subject taught in the commissioning building) as part of her research into the subject. That the shape can be described precisely using geometry was not apparently of primary concern. What was of concern was the wholeness of the monument. Maya Lin explained that, during construction she became hands-on and adjusted the final shape, presumably away from the mathematical, to give the natural appearance that she had imagined. She was much more concerned about the fact that students could sit on the wave-tops or lie in the hollows, to study in comfort, than that this shape was how the mathematician would have described it.
She talked about many of her more recent works in a similar vein, which was fascinating to me. This is where artist and scientist meet. This was an artist talking to artists. The language of the artist is one of emotion and feeling. The language of the scientist one of precision and logic. Architects come somewhere between, but the nature of their commissions require them to be artists rather than scientists. Maya Lin is an artist quite capable of channelling the scientist, as Wave Field shows.
In "Boundaries", her beautiful 2000 book, she describes her practice thus:
I am approaching an idea of simple in my architectural works. I want to understand simplicity not as a rigit minimalist ideal, in which a formula toward sparseness is almost religiously pursued, but to see it as a composition of forms, materials, and textures that is fundamentally "quiet".
This thesis was beautifully expounded in this first-rate lecture.