You cannot suddenly make Lower Manhattan into a sad place because we saw such a dramatic loss of life. You have to balance the memory, which is so important, and use it as a kind of Archimedean Point to create a lively, incredibly interesting, and culturally significant piece of a city and neighborhood.

It's about how to bring together the seemingly contradictory aspects of the memorial, which is about a tragedy and how it changed the world, but also about creating a vital and beautiful city of the 21st century.

To provide meaningful architecture is not to parody history, but to articulate it.

Don't look at the superficial success, at the short-term success. Look at the deep spiritual questions that architecture has to answer. Who do you build for? Where? What should you build?

We often judge cities by great public buildings. But we admire great cities because people live there in a beautiful way. You have to think about how each person will live there; you can't just think about abstract ideas.

I believe that the idea of the totality, the finality of the master-plan, is misguided. One should advocate a gradual transformation of public space, a metamorphic process, without relying on a hypothetical time in the future when everything will be perfect. The mistake of planners and architects is to believe that fifty years from now Alexanderplatz will be perfected. -p.197

I'm not Candide, nor Dr Pangloss, but we know that faith moves mountains.