I'm a little more measured. That sense of urgency I thought accompanied things - it can take a little longer. You have to take the long view.

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.

I had a dual role: designer and advocate.

I'm a little more measured. That sense of urgency I thought accompanied things - it can take a little longer. You have to take the long view.

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.

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

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.