How do you design it so that people can form a space of their own, and feel quiet and contemplative?

I believe that people are fundamentally are decent. And, yes, you will have people that sometimes will misbehave.

For two years nobody talked about anything other than the name arrangement. There was no fund-raising and no progress being made on construction and design.

You can just never desist. You have to always push back, whatever the pressures put on you.

As architects we are often involved in the concrete-steel-and-glass aspect of it, but cities are social structures, and to be involved in imagining the future of cities and the type of relationships and the types of places that we're making is something that intrigues me very much.

I love New York, but I'd felt like an outsider here.

I hope for the experience of people standing together, turning their backs to the city and facing this, and hearing the leaves rustle. Well, maybe it won't be as bucolic as at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, but I know you will feel removed from the city.