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

It sounds really over the top to say you're responsible for the city of New York, but I do feel responsibility to the city of New York, to this country, to people everywhere. So many people were affected by the events of September 11, and I feel this is one of the ways that that event will be understood and defined.

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

New York was a place I wanted to live and work all along. If I wasn't going to live in Israel, I had to live in New York.

When I was in the Army, the unit I served in, you could never stop. It was a volunteer unit, and there was a fairly high rate of attrition. The people who stayed through are the people who were either great at it or the people who just didn't know how to stop. And I fell into that second category.

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

I had a dual role: designer and advocate.