MAYA LIN
DANCING ABOUT ARCHITECTURE This year, the College is embarking on the first two of a series of exciting new building projects, including a new residence hall complex with some 300 rooms to be built in the open space southwest of Robbins Annex on a site that was once occupied by two temporary dormitory structures—Catskill and Hudson. But the first new building to break ground, this fall, will be a performing arts studio building designed by Maya Lin. In her senior year at Yale University, Lin submitted the winning design in a national competition for the Vietnam Veterans
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Memorial in Washington, DC, now one of the most visited public memorials in the world. She went on to graduate school at Yale, where she was told by one of her teachers, “Don’t worry about deciding between art or architecture, just keep doing what you’re doing.” That teacher was Frank Gehry. Which makes it all the more appropriate that her performing arts studio building will be situated in meadows overlooking woodlands and the Catskill Mountains to the west of the Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts. Fisher Center Artistic Director and Chief Executive Gideon Lester calls the
building, “a generational and stylistic dance” between Lin and Gehry, who designed Bard’s spectacular Fisher Center. In 2017, Lin presented the Anthony Hecht Lectures in the Humanities at Bard College— “The ‘Memory Works’” and “At the Intersection of Art and Architecture.” Her career as an artist, designer, and environmentalist epitomizes that intersection. As Lin writes in Boundaries (Simon & Schuster), “I see myself existing between boundaries, a place where opposites meet; science and art, art and architecture, East and