Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

by Temple Grandin

In 1982, a twenty-one-year-old architecture student at Yale beat out 1,420 other competitors to win a commission to design the Vietnam War memorial in Washington. Maya Lin’s design consisted of two two-hundred-foot-long polished black granite walls that were installed at 10.1 feet below grade and met in an obtuse angle of 125 degrees. It was a completely radical idea, and as with many radical ideas, it met with some intense backlash. Some critics felt that the submerged monument disrespected the very lives it was meant to commemorate. The walls are inscribed with the names of the more than 58,000 killed in combat or missing in action in the Vietnam War. The names appear not alphabetically but chronologically, by the date of each soldier’s death. This was “the genius of Maya’s design,” said Jan Scruggs, the Vietnam veteran whose mission it was to build the memorial. “The chronological order allows veterans who were in battle to see their friends forever united on the Wall.”