Maya Lin to Build Otherworldly “Floating Landscape” at UT Austin
The architect and artist’s first public artwork in Texas will open in April 2027.
Maya Lin, the architect and artist behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, and the Civil Rights Memorial in Alabama, will debut her next public art commission in April 2027 at the University of Texas at Austin. Commissioned by the university's public art program Landmarks, “Floating Landscape” will unfold across a 3,600-square-foot outdoor installation comprising sculptural, architectural, and ecological design elements.
“‘Floating Landscape’ is both a work of art and a place people can inhabit,” Andrée Bober, founding director and curator of Landmarks, told Hyperallergic.
The commission will be housed on the grounds of the Autry C. Stephens engineering building, within a meadow that the artist restored in collaboration with the landscape architecture firm Lionheart Places and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. At its center will be a curvilinear concrete structure pockmarked with an opening through which the native plants of the meadow will sprout. LED lights embedded in the concrete will mimic the constellations that formed above Austin on the night of the university's founding in 1883.
