A noble space, unlike any other of our time, for it is both strong and delicate. It seems to call at once for a Boeing 747 and for a string quartet.

Riding on the IRT is usually a matter of serving time in one of the city's most squalid environments-noisy, smelly, crowded and overrun with a ceaseless supply of graffiti.

Buildings don't exist to be pinned, like brooches, on the front of bigger structures to which they bear only the most distant of relationships.

In the first year, it looked as if we were really gonna aim for the highest thing possible. And then, gradually, sort of like the waves eating away at a sand castle, you know, they just wore away, bit by bit and it's gotten more and more ordinary.

It's been consumed by politics, controlled by politics and seems only to get more and more just sunk into the quicksand of politics,

We like to think of New York as the nation's most cosmopolitan city, a place in which the independence and freedom and values of art and culture are not questioned by anybody, [as if] that debate is over. But that debate is never really over, and Ground Zero is the perfect way to bring that debate back to the fore, even in New York.