Maya Lin, the architect and artist known for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC, and the Civil Rights Memorial in Alabama, will unveil her next public art commission in April 2027 at the University of Texas at Austin. The work, commissioned by the university’s public art program Landmarks, is titled “Floating Landscape.”
The outdoor installation will span 3,600 square feet and combine 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 installed on the grounds of the Autry C. Stephens engineering building, within a meadow that Lin restored with the landscape architecture firm Lionheart Places and the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center. At the center of the piece will be a curvilinear concrete structure marked by an opening through which native meadow plants will emerge.
Embedded LED lights in the concrete will echo the constellations visible above Austin on the night the university was founded in 1883. The project is designed to function as both an artwork and an inhabitable landscape, extending Lin’s interest in memorial, environmental, and public forms.
