I'm standing outside facing two perfectly polished black granite walls and I'm looking at a sea of names.

Each one is a person who served and died in the Vietnam War. You may have

been here yourself. If not, you've probably seen pictures of this place. It's the

Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. The walls

appear to be cut into the earth. They're 10 feet at their deepest where they join

in a wide open v and each one gently tapers out to a point.

You can't hear the traffic here much, just the sound of an occasional plane flying overhead. The dead are listed here according to when they died, but they're

arranged so that when you stand in the middle where the walls meet, that's where I'm standing

now, you can take in the name of the first person to die and

the last person to die at once. There's Dale R. Boyce, who died in 1959, Richard Vandigir in 1975. Their names are the bookends for

58,316 others listed on the memorial. That was all by design of course. This was all by design. The quiet, the simplicity, the names

unadorned and displayed like a book.

Maya Lynn was 21 when her design was chosen. It was a blind competition

so the judges had no idea they were picking the work of a college student and an Asian American college student at that.

Both of which became factors in the firestorm of controversy surrounding the design.

If you weren't alive or old enough in 1981 to be aware,

my God, even if you were, it's hard to conceive of what went on over this memorial because there's certainly no controversy now.

This place is almost sacred and it's drenched with the tears of the 5 million plus visitors who come each year.

Mya Lynn has continued to create memorials and buildings and incredible works of art ever since.

Her story and her truly original views about art and

architecture and remembrance are the subject of today's episode of what it takes. A

podcast about passion, vision vision and perseverance from the Academy of

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