Vietnam Veterans Memorial
— — a wall that goes down into the earth and back up.
Not only on a wall.
“Two long walls of polished black granite, set into the ground at a shallow angle, meeting at the apex where the names are deepest. Maya Lin was twenty-one when she designed it. The visitor walks down into the earth and back up, and somewhere along that walk the wall begins reflecting the trees and the visitor's own face beside the carved names. People leave letters at the base. The Park Service collects them at the end of every day. from the studio
Vietnam Veterans Memorial, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial sits in Constitution Gardens on the western end of the National Mall in Washington, D.C., a short walk from the Lincoln Memorial. The wall was dedicated on November 13, 1982, after a national design competition won by Maya Lin, then a 21-year-old undergraduate at Yale. The memorial bears more than 58,000 names of U.S. service members who died or remain missing from the Vietnam War, inscribed in chronological order by date of casualty across 144 panels of polished black granite quarried in Bangalore, India.
The wall is faced in gabbro, a dense black igneous stone cut and polished in Barre, Vermont, then engraved by V-shaped sandblasting to a depth that catches the eye but does not break the mirror surface. The reflection is the design's quiet argument: the visitor sees the trees, the sky, and their own face standing beside the carved names. The two wings stretch 246 feet each and meet at a 125-degree angle, pointing toward the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial.
The memorial is open 24 hours a day, every day of the year, and admission is free. Park Rangers staff the site from early morning until late evening and will help locate a specific name using the directory at either end of the wall. The National Park Service collects the objects left at the base each night; the items go into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Collection, now numbering more than 400,000 letters, photographs, and personal effects held in a Park Service archive in Maryland.