Maya Lin’s final memorial

July 5, 2012

“The project, called “What is Missing?,” seeks to highlight issues surrounding biodiversity and species loss due to human action and inaction through a variety of installations and media including sculptures like the Listening Cone at the California Academy of Sciences, over 150 videos such as “Unchopping a Tree,” and hundreds of stories collected through the What is Missing? Foundation’swebsite. Strongly focused on individual experiences of what Lin calls ‘the Sixth Great Extinction,’ the What is Missing? project seeks to educate world citizens about the dangers of habitat destruction and the former vitality and diversity of places around the globe.

The fact that the project straddles the disciplinary boundaries between architecture, landscape, sculpture, and information design makes it especially accessible and compelling, and raises the question of whether a memorial need be a static object, such as a statue on a pedestal. In fact, this memorial is constantly changing as visitors to the website submit memories of rivers that used to teem with fish but now run empty, or of forests where now only subdivisions run to the horizon.”

http://www.architizer.com/en_us/blog/dyn/44188/maya-lins-final-memorial/