The Invisible Arch

Everyone knows the story of Maya Lin, the 21-year-old Yale undergraduate architecture student whose minimalist design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington DC won out over 1,420 other submissions, including that of the professor who gave Lin a B grade for the same design in his class. It’s a classic American underdog story about how the best idea will prevail regardless of who it comes from. And in 1981, it came from the most unexpected person: a young, Asian American woman.

A simple “cut” in the earth revealing two reflective black walls lined with the names of the fallen soldiers, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has since become one of the most visited and celebrated memorials in the world. But the minimalist design belies the sophisticated selection process that produced it. In an anonymous design competition that was open to any US citizen over 18 years old, all entries were judged solely on their design, rather than the credentials of the person behind it. Anonymity was intended to prevent racism, sexism, and ageism from influencing the selection. The jury of architects, landscape architects, and artists chose an abstract design that completely departed from the figurative and didactic representation that people expected of memorials — a design that many non-experts would have dismissed. This process — esteemed arts professionals reviewing anonymous entries — is what produced the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

Given how successful the memorial has been, one might think that subsequent public projects would have employed a similar selection process. The recently initiated effort to design a “Chinatown Welcome Gateway” in Manhattan’s Chinatown, however, reveals a stark contrast. This past June, artists were asked to submit their qualifications in the form of a resume, written statements, and work samples. The application emphasized that this initial vetting was based on preexisting qualifications only: “Proposals are not requested and will not be reviewed by the panel.”

Versions of this two-part process have been used to commission hundreds of public art projects throughout the city. It is adapted from Percent for Art, a program started in the 1980s and administered by the Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA); designed to engage the community in which the art will be placed through active participation in the process and shared decision making. This is reflected in the jury who are choosing the artist for the Gateway project: a voting panel and an advisory panel made up of government representatives, arts professionals, community groups, and civilians.

The identity of these panelists are not available publicly, and recent requests to DCLA about their identity have not been answered. According to the Design Brief, they are representatives from city agencies (DCLA, Percent for Art, Economic Development Corporation, Department of Transportation), a representative from the architecture firm responsible for implementing the gateway, Marvel, and “representatives of the public who are arts professionals — knowledgeable about public art, the project, and the community in which the project will be located.”

The identities of the advisory panel are also unclear. It is composed of an unspecified number of representatives from 19 Chinatown organizations, program staff from city agencies, elected officials, other local organizations and community groups, and members of the public.

At a meeting on June 25, the voting and advisory panelists identified together which artists will now take part in the second phase of the process, a public design charrette with Marvel. There, the artists will “discuss their creative practice, working process, and artistic approach and brainstorm possibilities for the project.” So even in this second phase there will be no gateway design. Instead, it will assess the artist’s compatibility with the architects and what approach the artist might take to create a gateway design. At the end of the charrette, only the voting panelists will decide by majority vote who the artist will be.

A document which describes the guidelines and goals for the project written by the Welcome Gateway Subgroup (a subcommittee composed of four leaders from local community organizations, one artist, and one lawyer) lays out the criteria for choosing an artist and what their design should accomplish. It starts unambiguously: “The artist should show a meaningful connection with the Chinatown community through personal or professional ties, and demonstrate a thorough understanding of the neighborhood’s cultural, social, and historical context.” The document outlines four design guidelines, with bulleted suggestions for how to accomplish them. For example, artists should avoid the use of “design elements based on oversimplified representations of Chinese American culture” and instead using ones that are “deeply researched” and “respectful of the community’s cultural heritage.” The design should “reflect on Chinatown‘s past while celebrating its present and future” and “celebrate the diversity within Chinatown, including its various stories, languages, dialects, foods, and experiences.” The gateway needs to “embody an authentic representation of the Chinatown community.”

But what is “authentic” for a community that has been around for more than 150 years, and whose residents, storefronts, and cultures are constantly changing? Is the Taishanese community around Mott Street more authentic than the Fujianese one around East Broadway? Are new immigrants who don’t speak English just as authentically Chinese American as those who have been around for generations and don’t speak Chinese? And do all of these people share a single “authentic” culture?

The emphasis on “authenticity” and “pride” in the design brief is the direct result of an attempt to build a Chinatown gateway in 2017. In a design competition spearheaded by the Department of Transportation (DOT) in collaboration with the Chinatown Partnership and Van Alen Institute, entrants were asked to submit full designs for a gateway. Half of the evaluation was based on the actual design proposal, while the other half was on the entrant’s experience. Submissions were not anonymous — prior experience and qualifications mattered a lot.

But the jury itself was anonymous. The only information the City gave was that it was composed of “a minimum of three persons qualified” and included representatives from the DOT and possibly other city agencies or approved parties.

More than 80 proposals were submitted, with four finalists selected. The finalists presented their designs behind closed doors in a DOT meeting room. According to two of the finalists, they were prohibited from knowing who the jurors were, despite the fact that they were right in front of them. And only one of the jurors appeared to be Asian.

More than a year later, a winner was suddenly announced: a proposal called “The Dragon’s Roar,” designed by Australian artist Lindy Lee and New York City-based architecture firm LEVENBETTS. The winning design was a small tower composed of overlapping metal cylinders punctuated by circular holes of varying sizes. The cylindrical tower form was a reference to the generic water towers in the city and also an Italian Campanile, with the latter reference a way to relate to Little Italy. The pattern of circular holes represented Confucian beliefs around harmony, unity, and “universal collectivity.”

The process dictated that the winning design be presented publicly. At subsequent community board meetings, members of the Chinatown community voiced strong opposition to the design. Some community members compared it to a stack of tin cans, while another said the pattern of circular voids looked like bullet holes. Almost everyone failed to see anything Chinese or Chinatown-related. As negative criticism mounted, the City had no choice but to cancel the project in 2019, without an official announcement.

This is the history that weighs on the current gateway project and explains the repeated insistence that the future design embody “an authentic representation of Chinatown.” Will Chinatown get a gateway this time? Can this process produce one?

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF) hired a professional advisor to organize and oversee the management of the 1980 competition. Paul Spreiregan had been the director of urban design programs at the American Institute of Architects as well as the first director of architecture programs at the National Endowment for the Arts. In his book, Design Competitions, Spreiregan compared holding a competition to launching a rocket: “Everything has to be thought out and in place before the launch button is pressed.”

Who would be on the jury was crucial, and itself highly contested within the VVMF. Some believed that the jury should be made up primarily of veterans, while others thought that a mix of veterans and arts professionals would be best. The VVMF Board decided on a jury of only highly regarded professional artists and designers, with the understanding that they had the best expertise to envision how two-dimensional drawings would be experienced in real life. Spreiregan and the VVMF Board interviewed potential jurors and scrutinized their compatibility with each other, ultimately selecting two architects, two landscape architects, three sculptors, and the editor of Landscape Architecture Magazine. Their names were included in the competition brief. Neither Spreiregan nor any other VVMF board members were part of the jury, nor were any government officials. Nor were any Vietnam veterans or members of the general public.

After spending five days in a military hanger looking through the submissions, the jury chose submission #1026 and unsealed the entrant’s name. “It was the most thoughtful and thorough discussion of design that I have ever heard, and I have heard many,” Spreiregan recalled.

But even this process, the one that produced such a celebrated project, is more complicated than it seems. When Maya Lin’s design, and her identity, were revealed, there was tremendous backlash. Some responses were racist and sexist, and others demanded a more traditional memorial. One of her most vocal opponents saw Lin’s design as a “black hole,” a sadistic reward for the veterans’ sacrifices. “Why can’t we have something white and traditional and above ground?” Tom Carhart asked in a New York Times op-ed, “Insulting Vietnam Vets.” “The jurors know nothing of the real war in Vietnam,” he wrote.

There was so much controversy that Interior Secretary James Watt would not issue a building permit for the construction of Lin’s design until a compromise was reached to add a figurative sculpture of three soldiers and a flagpole. Two years after the memorial was finished, the Three Servicemen sculpture was erected about 150 feet away from Lin’s abstraction.

The figurative soldiers were not the only addition to the memorial. Because a Vietnam War army nurse campaigned to honor the more than 11,500 American women who served primarily as nurses during the war, the Vietnam Women’s Memorial was built in 1993. Like the Three Servicemen, it is a figurative statue that depicts three nurses tending to a wounded male soldier. Then in 1995, a woman whose brother died of non-Hodgkins lymphoma because of his exposure to Agent Orange initiated The Vietnam War In Memory Memorial Plaque Project to honor veterans who died from Agent Orange exposure, PTSD, or other illnesses. So in 2004, a small memorial plaque was installed on the ground next to the Three Servicemen statue.

This landscape is a more complete monument, one that captures not just the people memorialized by it, but also the complex, contentious, and imperfect process by which it was realized. All four components of the memorial — designed by different people, in different styles, and dedicated at different times — reflect the underlying complexity of the Vietnam War itself.

Is creating the “physical manifestation of heritage and cultural tradition” — an “authentic representation of Chinatown” — any less complex?

In the process designed by Percent for Art, a panel made up of both government representatives and artists selects finalists from an open call to produce design proposals or to go through “design charettes.” The public is allowed to submit comments, after which the City makes its final choice. This process was recently used to commission a sculpture for a Chinatown community center, and a variation of the process was used for the Shirley Chisholm monument currently being built in Prospect Park. The city of Newark employed a similar process to build a monument to Harriet Tubman.

But the process has also failed. In 2019, the City sought an artist to replace a statue of J. Marion Sims, the “father of gynecology” who experimented on slaves. When the voting panel of “art experts” chose artist Simone Leigh’s proposal, activists and community members protested because they believed they should be the ones who chose the artist, not the panel. A highly charged public meeting involved shouting, crying, and even the use of racial slurs against members of the jury. Attendees decried what they perceived as a failure of process. Tom Finkelpearl, the commissioner of the DCLA at the time, hedged the judges’ decision, calling it “advisory,” after which Leigh withdrew her proposal, writing in a statement: “I greatly appreciate that my proposal was selected by the committee. However, I am aware that there is significant community sentiment for another proposal. Since this is a public monument in their neighborhood, I defer to them.”

Will the Chinatown Welcome Gateway process be smooth like the Shirley Chisholm monument, or catastrophic like the Beyond Sims debacle? An anonymous group of panelists with unscrutinized credentials is expected to reach a consensus about who is best positioned to make a truly “authentic” design that “celebrates heritage” and “generates a true sense of pride.” But there is no way to evaluate whether the panelists possess the requisite understanding of Chinatown, Chinese American culture, art, architecture, or design. Will a random DOT representative help determine what is “authentically” Chinese American? Because it is unclear who or how many people are on the panels, there is also no consideration for how they will deliberate. Will the arts professionals clash with the government representatives on the voting panel, or with the members of the public on the advisory panel? What if older and more conservative community groups want a more traditional artist, while younger panelists prefer a less conventional one? (Apparently the panelists have already chosen the artist finalists from a pool of 130 submissions. No information about the deliberation process, the panelists, or any of the artists is publicly available to those who did not attend the June 25 meeting, as of now.)

Rather than a request for proposals, as dictated by the Percent for Art template, should there instead be a request for process? Should the process itself be open to critique and redesign? Should the City hire a professional advisor who has experience successfully facilitating difficult public projects? Should those responsible for designing the process be held to the same standard and scrutiny they use for the artists? Should their qualifications be examined, and should they be required to have a demonstrated track record of executing complicated cultural projects?

In my opinion, the Chinatown gateway already exists. It’s invisible. It is a monument to the lack of process that has dictated the previous, failed efforts; the inability of those spearheading the project to design a process that successfully integrates competing interests of a diverse community into something physical. The process is the project.

This invisible arch can paradoxically be interpreted as the best possible monument to Chinatown’s diversity — the same diversity the current call wishes to celebrate. Chinatown’s true “authenticity” — its past, present, and future and all the people and histories within it — cannot be captured in a single object, a single gateway. The invisible arch poses complicated questions around culture, representation, and community. The absence of the gateway is the most “authentic” representation of Chinatown to me.