Michael Arad

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

You have to always push back, whatever the pressures put on you.

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

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.

I really appreciate artists of the 20th century, and I can see a lot of their influence on my work, but to suggest that my design only fits within an 'ism' kind of bothers me.

I built a series of supporters that had my back. I never abused that trust. You can't cry wolf. You have to solve most problems yourself.

When I started this project, I was a young architect. I was very apprehensive about any changes to the design. Whether I wanted to or not, I learned that you can accept some changes to its form without compromising its intent. But it's a leap of faith that I didn't want to make initially - to put it mildly.

It was really a magical moment, to see this idea that's in your head.

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 pushed the process forward by saying, 'We should do this, this, and this right now. Please find the budget for me to find a structural engineer, a mechanical engineer, a civil engineer, so we can do the preliminary work.'

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.