Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
that I had got at my fi rst visit, no matter how pressing my schedule was. In the
summer of 1984 when I visited there again, I came across a statute of three sol-
diers on the lawn unexpectedly in front of the Memorial in the west of the
Constitution Gardens. When I approached the statue, I realized that it was a mon-
ument that honors U.S. service members of the U.S. armed forces who fought in
the Vietnam War after the Second World War. The design of the memorial is an
open lawn in a wide V shape which gradually declines towards the interior angle.
Along the cleft are two low, black granite walls, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
Wall, on which are engraved the names of the more than fi fty thousand Americans
dead in the Vietnam War with their rankings. As one walked down along the wall
and looked at the names, a mournful sense would well up in his/her heart, so it
was also called “America's Wailing Wall”. One wing of the V-shaped Memorial
pointed the Washington Monument in the southeast, and the other to the Lincoln
Memorial in the southwest. This ingenious design was the work of a Chinese-
American architect Maya Lin.
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The implication of this design is also thought-
provoking, for the American people had strongly protested sending troops to
Vietnam and deemed the war as unjust. The site chosen for the Vietnam Veterans
Memorial is on the Mall located at the central axis. Looking along the extension
of the two walls, one can see the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial
in the distance, which would remind him/her of the vast discrepancy in nature
between the ideals embraced by the founding fathers of the United States of
America and the unjust Vietnam War. When I, a foreign visitor, stood on the axis
of the city of Washington and saw this memorial there, I could not help think of
the diffi culties and hardships the common people of America must overcome in
order to realize the ideals of their founding fathers.
4.4
Other Mountain's Stone May Polish the Jade—Some
Examples Which Can Be Referred to in the Construction
of Washington
Right from the very beginning of urban construction, the sister cities of Beijing and
Washington both tried their best to express their underlying concepts in their design
of a central axis line. In spite of the differences in their historical background, their
aims to refl ect the spirit of their age are the same. At the present time, the urban
development of the two cities has far exceeded their original design and plans.
Although the city walls of Old Beijing have been torn down and the city expanded
rapidly to the areas which used to be outside the city, the Old City is still the
nucleus of the overall plan for a new Beijing. The case is the same with Washington
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The design was selected in 1982, when Maya Lin was a student of architecture department of
Yale University.
