The Vietnam Veterans Memorial occupies a two-acre site on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., designed by Maya Lin, then a twenty-one-year-old Yale architecture student, whose entry won a national design competition in 1981. Completed in 1982, the memorial takes the form of two long, polished black granite walls set into the earth in a shallow V, inscribed with the names of more than 58,000 United States service members killed or listed as missing in the Vietnam War. Its stark, minimalist design departed sharply from traditional heroic war memorials and drew intense controversy when first unveiled, before becoming one of the most visited monuments in the capital. Visitors commonly leave mementos at the wall and take pencil rubbings of inscribed names, practices that have become part of the memorial's ongoing use.
Facts
Building Type LocationConstitution Gardens, Washington, D.C. 1 Completed Year Classification
Standing Status Building Type
Building Type (category) Connections
Has Building Type
Entity-backed identity for the building-type enum value this building already carries, resolved to an architecture concept by an explicit value-to-entity map (phase 3 bucket conversion, docs\design_entity_backed_browse_buckets_20260928.md). The building-type fact itself stays on the building unchanged.
Uses Element
Source Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Wikipedia
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Wikipedia
Introduction, first sentence
a U.S. national memorial in Washington, D.C., honoring service members
Introduction, location clause
in Constitution Gardens, adjacent to the National Mall
Introduction, completion clause
The Wall, completed in 1982
- Wikipedia "Vietnam Veterans Memorial" intro (read live, w-fk-arch-rel2-0927c, R-K)
Entity description and the lead/infobox of the Wikipedia article
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, commonly called the Vietnam Memorial, is a U.S. national memorial in Washington, D.C., honoring service members of the United States Armed Forces who served in the Vietnam War. The two-acre (8,100 m2) site is dominated by two black granite walls engraved with the names of those service members who died or remain missing as a result of their service in Vietnam and South East Asia during the war. The Memorial Wall was designed by American architect Maya Lin and is an
Uses Element: Granite, Wikipedia lead
The two-acre (8,100 m2) site is dominated by two black granite walls engraved with the names of those service members who died or remain missing as a result of their service in Vietnam and South East Asia during the war.
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