Business as Usual

What’s gone through your mind while watching the development of this memorial over the past five years?

It’s actually been sad, because I watched this go from a lot of optimism and hope that we’d be able to produce something that really reflected the profound emotions that everyone felt in the months after 9/11, to watching it gradually become much more business as usual.

Why do you mean by business as usual?

We’ve seen a whole bunch of rather traditional conflicts between people pushing for their own self-interests. Obviously money is a big part of it, [as well as] the conflict between business and a more public and commemorative function of the site, different philosophies, different attitudes and there’s been no clear sense of coming together, which was what everyone hoped for and genuinely expected after 9/11.

Why do you think that’s happened?

[This project has become] incredibly complicated because it involves everything from the political, cultural, the emotional, the financial, and all these things kind of crash into each other like bumper cars at an amusement park.