The Vietnam Memorial was a revolution in thinking about memorials. “Twenty-one years later, the wall of names has become a visual cliche and memorial designers are straining to reach the profound synthesis of form and meaning that the Vietnam memorial so eloquently achieved. The finalists in the World Trade Center memorial competition have many of the superficial attributes of the Vietnam Memorial — the stark materials, the abstract vocabulary, the striving for elemental simplicity. Yet at this point, they are simply Maya Lin wannabes, not the real thing.”