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Her enthusiasm for that work is infectious. In person, she is shy yet affable, serious but quick to smile, and full of energy; she doesn't so much walk as dart. Her private life, centered on a Bowery loft with the sculptor Peter Boynton and a cat named Sam, is something she guards fiercely. Her black hair, which once extended to her waist, has been cut short for quite some time, and her dark eyes draw you to her with their intensity. She dresses simply -- T shirts and sneakers whenever possible -- is self-conscious about her youthful appearance (she turned 30 in October, and had looked forward to it for months) and prefers reading a Borges short story to anything that might be on television.
As Lin grew up, one of the subjects she excelled in was mathematics. That skill not only led her toward architecture but also shapes her outlook on work. "If you present me with a problem, and if I like it and think I can work with it, I'll do it." That's an understatement. In point of fact, she finds herself driven to solve it, immediately.
In the seven years since she left Washington, some of which she spent briefly at Harvard and then back at Yale, getting a master's, those "problems" have included the renovation of a Victorian house in Connecticut; the design of a stage set in Philadelphia; a corporate logo for financier Reginald Lewis; an open-air gathering place at Juniata College in Pennsylvania; and, soon, a "playful park" outside the Charlotte Coliseum in North Carolina (using trees shaped like spheres), and for the Long Island Rail Road section of New York's Pennsylvania Station, a glass-block ceiling, featuring fragmented, elliptical rings. In addition, there is her sculpture, which has been part of an exhibit at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York City. Combining lead (which she loves for its malleability and its "seductive" quality) and broken safety glass, her pieces achieve her goal of being "beautiful but not pretty, strong and tough, yet not intimidating." They are very direct, in the same way she is.
Even though this array of projects suggests an artist who refuses to specialize, who doesn't see limits, who, perhaps most important, doesn't want to be forever categorized as the "designer of the Viet Nam memorial," her approach to her work is intrinsically the same as it has always been. When she looks at a site, she says, she considers more than the mere physicality of it. She considers the "emotional and psychological context" of the place -- the people, the background, the history. Then there is the form itself. "Tactility," she says suddenly, with such emphasis that it suggests the essence of her perceptions. "Immediate sensations of material. Things are minimal in my vocabulary, so that means everything counts. Light counts. Sound counts. Height differences count.
"You don't see a piece of sculpture without touching it," she emphasizes. "When I taught a class at Phillips Exeter, I told my students to close < their eyes and feel an object, feel its proportion. Then I would take it away and make them draw it. If you create something unusual, people will take the next step in."