Transcript: Michael Bierut

Conducted on August 30, 2007, by Joe Posner and Henry Shepherd.

MB: My name's Michael Bierut, I'm a graphic designer who's been working for 25-plus years here in New York City. I've been a partner at a firm called Pentagram in New York, where I do a wide range of projects that can be very small ones like doing illustration for the Op-Ed page for The New York Times, and much larger ones, like doing a corporate identity for a major institution, or corporation, or things like that, and everything in between. Right now we're working on all the graphics for the new New York Times headquarters building, and that includes the sign on the outside and the signs on the inside, and the business cards for all of the people that work there, and some other details that they're doing, like the markings on the plates in the cafeteria and everything else, so it's a big project for a beautiful, exhaustive building that's a complete, different experience from the kinds, from the kind of environment where The New York Times has been housed for the better part of the last century. We're doing graphics and signage for three new museums in New York: the museum of Art and Design up on Columbus Circle, a relocated museum of Chinese and America, being designed by Maya Lin, in Chinatown, and a great institution called the Tenement Museum, which is down on the lower east side on Orchard Street. And we're also doing a couple book designs, a couple of projects with colleges and universities, Princeton and Yale, a couple of other ones like that, so our work ranges from corporate things to cultural things. And I have to admit that we don't, I personally don't make much of a distinction between them, I think that all these things vie for our attention, and the visual, cultural marketplace, and the best institutions, whether they're commercial or corporate, kind of just try to communicate as compellingly as possible, and in doing so, reach the audiences that are the most receptive to what they're communicating.

HS: Do you think that a truly effective, or a profoundly effective design, leaves a lot of room for interpretation to vary among people, or do you think that a really effective design, or a powerful design, is forceful enough really to push a large number of people in the same kind of direction?

MB: Well, design effectiveness gets judged in a lot of different ways, and sometimes the goal of a design is very clear. If you're doing signs in an airport, we have done that job, that's sort of a, you know that's pretty, you know, you understand clearly what the name of the game is. If someone arrives, if someone gets dropped off in the, you know, on the front curb, and from that moment to the moment they're sitting on a plane, and they're just looking at their watch and just worried about whether they're going to get there on time. So what you have to do is give them a sign every single time, at the right place, at the right size, at the right level of legibility, that sort of make them feel like they're without any confusion, and without any additional insecurity, kind of moving progressively, ever closer to their departure gate and their journey, right? And sometimes actually, if you have a plan, you can actually put dots exactly where those moments are, and sort of like the joys of multiple interpretations are absolutely nonexistent in that situation. You know, you don't want people to, sort of like, be having different, sort of like, you know, thoughtful, cerebral reactions to airport signs, or worse yet, to fire exit signs, or you know, important life safety things.

You know, on the other hand, I've always thought that, you know, what makes really resilient, you know, logos sometimes, is the fact that they actually are almost these kind of, merely featureless vessels that get filled with the meaning that actual experience provides. You know, again, to talk about Target, that's just a dot with a circle around it that looks, you know, that has the advantage of being a very simple picture of the word "target," you know, the same way you know, the apple on your computer is a very simple picture of the word "apple." But you know, the Nike swoosh isn't a picture of anything, you know, it was never intended to be, it was just one desperate option out of a number of desperate options, to come up with something that the owners of the young company Nike thought could compete effectively with the fantastic three stripes that Adidas had. And so now we look at that thing and we think, oh this is "just do it", etc., etc., all of the athletes that they've signed up and made expensive commercials. You know, all extolling not just their products, never their products, but actually, instead, the promise of athletic achievement as a means of self-improvement, you know, they sort of manage to marry that simple, dopey, thirty-dollar price-tag shape, that's how much they pay the designer to do it way back when, when they didn't have much money, and when they had a young, recent graduate from Portland State, kind of whip it up for them. You know, I think, now it's sort of really seen as this meaningful thing, and it is sort of open to interpretation. And there's actually, there's a great, there's this well-known book that I bet, you know, a lot of people have seen, called "No Logo" that actually kind of looks with suspicion at the world of logos. And I read a response one time that actually ran in the Economist, called "Pro-Logo," and it took me by surprise because the case they made was that the usefulness of, that the power of say, the Nike swoosh, was such that it actually benefitted everyone. You know it, the more the Nike management invested with power, the more effective it became as a device that people that were objecting say to, oversees manufacturing abuses, or any other thing they wanted to use, they could use exactly the same device and just turn it over on them. And so, it's sort of like in a way, it's sort of what's great about that kind of communication in a way, when it's done, when it's really powerful and it's done right, is that it actually becomes accessible to a lot of people, open to a lot of different interpretation. If you were protesting Nike's practices for some reason, or any corporate practice, if they, the reason, well in fact, this article I think made the case that you know, Nike's really not, you know, even the people that were the most opposed to Nike would admit readily that they weren't at the top of the list in terms of you know, people who, corporations that actually, were most culpable for that sort of activity. However, because of their visibility, because of the fact that they actually had stuck their neck so out there, provided such an easy device to manipulate, you know, that sort of becomes a tool that is available for not just Nike to use, but for people who want to use Nike to make a point to use. And then Nike, in turn, had to figure out how they sort of changed their approach, you know, not just to their own practices, which they did, but also to how they communicated and the claims they made. So it's sort becomes this, and I mean I think at it's best, it sort of becomes a way that you know, consumers and citizens get to, you know, interact in a way with entities like corporations that otherwise just would be too vast and kind of unknowable, and kind of blank and monolithic to them. You know, so I think that having something open interpretations, definitely, the ideal in a way, and not everyone can achieve it, and not everyone should achieve it, but when it's achieved it's a nice thing.

HS: Do you think that there are limits to that kind of malleability that you're talking about, being able to pro and con about using the same, about referring to the same image? One of them that comes to mind to me, and I believe that you blogged about it, or I saw on the blog was the final, the ultimate end of the swastika and how it can be used. I can imagine that a swastika would never even be used by people who were against, you know, Nazis --

MB: Yeah, yeah.

HS: ... that it has become too difficult.

MB: Well I mean, if you take the mark of the swastika, which famously now, I think everybody knows it had a long history that predated the Third Reich, that you know, it's a simple geometric form, you know, in the East and in the Third World represented all sorts of things to different people. You know, sort of was used brilliantly, everyone concedes, by Hitler and Albert Speer, Hermann Goring, etc., to be a great coordinated brand-identity for Nazism, and to a degree where it's almost kind of you know, "beyond redemption," to quote from a title of a book by Steven Heller about it. You know, I've seen posters where I mean, on the other hand, if you wanted to you know, the notorious at its first-time cover of the "Rise of Third Reich", is just a black cover, white dot, and a swastika on it, which was just...I remember at the time it was seen as being just like unbelievably shocking, the idea that you'd go into a bookstore and see a swastika like that. But on the other, it sort of accurately identified, what's interesting is it sort of you know, it sort of managed to separate, you know, as well as say, as opposed to advocating ideology, it was kind of labeling; it was like a warning label on contents in a way, you know? So I think to a certain degree it sort of has shifted slightly, however, as a designer, I can speak for any graphic designer, you know, if you're working on some abstract symbol for any client whatsoever, and you happen to come up with something that is based in quadrants and has sort of an angular rotational quality to it, if you were in a meeting, sometimes people will like it, and they will think, Oh, that one looks good, it has a lot of energy, it's really cool, I like it, it's really crisp. The minute someone actually uses the "s" word, and says, "doesn't it sort of look like a swastika?", like no matter, even if it doesn't really look like a swastika, that one is, like, dead; it is just seen as being like absolute poison, and I mean, it's just sort of a funny thing. I mean, it really is absolutely the third rail on graphic design: you cannot touch it and recover from it basically, so. But again, that has nothing at all to do with the inherent forms of that shape, that has everything to do with you know, the monumental evil of Nazism in the 20th century. You know, and I think it just goes to show you that a symbol is essentially just sort of a, you know, a blank form, a waiting meaning, and the meaning comes from, not from what people like me design, or what spinmeisters concoct, but actually what really happens in the world, you know?

HS: Meaning that the Nazis intended to give to it wasn't inherent in the shape itself, but merely the identification?

MB: Yeah, right. Now you could say, you could say that if it was, you could say that if the swastika was roundy, as opposed to angular, that it would look, you know, it would be less suitable for the kind of ... I mean, you can actually probably say that you know, you know, the Nike swoosh kind of looks energetic somehow, or the Target target looks sort of forthright, or the apple, or the apple is sort of, you know, from the tree of knowledge, and is a friendly apple for the teacher; it sort of seems simple, accessible, "a" is for apple, you know, as opposed to a word like Microsoft that's kind of a concoction of you know, a built word out of a couple of you know, out of software and Micro whatever, you know, whatever it meant, it sort of sounds distancing, and was probably meant to be nerdy and distancing when it was, you know, invented. And apple was sort of instead, something you might see on the first page of a, you know, a kindergartner's alphabet book? You know, so I think you, there are some choices that are better than others. It's, you know, although you could probably could do an interesting experiment where you just kind of randomized everything, you know, I mean the reason people end up coming to a place like this is because they have some suspicion that although you can make a lot of different things work, there's probably easier paths and harder paths, let's say.

HS: What role do you think design can play in shaping whether people feel safe and secure or unsafe and insecure?

MB: You know at its best, I think, what makes people feel secure is sort of, is understanding, is knowledge in a way; not feeling lost, not feeling uncertain, not feeling that they don't know what's going to happen next. And I think to a certain degree, if you can help people feel more confident about their understanding of something, and you can use the tools of graphic design to do that, you're reducing their insecurity and making them, in effect, feel safer. When we do, we do public sign programs sometimes, whether you're in an airport let's say, you're not going to feel like, in danger, you'll feel in danger of missing your flight if it's a confusing place and the signs are bad, but even in lower Manhattan, we did a sign program down there which, and Manhattan south of City Hall is actually a very, very, very safe neighborhood, really safe. And there, but there were polls at the time that showed tourists actually felt vaguely uneasy down there, and their unease came not from the fact that there was any statistical evidence that there was crime down there, or even that there, that it was dark or shadowy or anything else. It had a lot to do with the fact that unlike the upper parts of Manhattan which since the early 19th century all been laid out on a right-angled grid pattern, that part, the lower part of Manhattan, was based on the old Dutch street patterns, which were all angular and kind of like, you know, started out as dirt paths, that then were paved over, eventually Wall Street, all of those streets, Broad Street, all those streets down there. And people, tourists and even, you know, New Yorkers down there, they always felt they were about to get lost, they sort of could never quite know whether, you know, they came out of a subway they could never quite figure out if they went left or right. And all of that kind of vague confusion just kind of starts to build up in you, and then you sort of think, you know, you start to think whether it is or not, that it's not well lit down there, that it's dark and spooky down there, that it's just kind of like confusing. One of the things our sign program is intended to do, and I think has done, is make people feel they have a little more secure for two reasons, I would say. One is that the signs actually provide real information. You know, there are signs that kind of, with some predictability, can tell you we have maps on there, we have ways for if you're looking for the Statue of Liberty ferry, it's that way, if you're looking for the South Street Seaport, it's that way, you know, etc., etc. The other way I think they provide some sense of security is just by their mere presence: it makes it seem like someone, somewhere is, you know, taking responsibility for the stewardship of this place. And I think in the public realm, you know, what we look to from our public institutions, from our civic institutions, is this sense that things are being taken care of. You know, and, you know, Rudy Giuliani and William Bratton's famous Broken Windows approach to reducing crime in New York, was very much about that, it was about you know, you could fight crime either by, you know, arresting bad guys, which was one way, but I actually if you went around and kind of like fixed all the broken windows in a neighborhood, you know, once the windows, if broken windows were allowed to say broken, seemed to be a signal to people that like, anything goes here, you know? We didn't care if you break windows, we didn't care if you break heads, we don't care what you break, you know, this is a no-man's land. And if you actually kind of attended to the seemingly cosmetic aspects of civic life, whether a window was repaired or not, that actually kind of created a sense of public safety. And I think graphic design, to a certain degree, often rightly dismissed as cosmetic, can play a similar sort of role.

HS: To return to sort of the earlier examples in the more graphic realm, do you think, just taking as an example, the signs on the subway and subway stations, or around New York let's say, "If you see something, say something" ...

MB: Yeah...

HS: Do you think those... I want to talk about both the inspiration behind them and the effects you think they might have. Do you think that they are intended to make people feel more or less safe, and that they have the effect of making people feel more or less safe?

MB: You know the kind of examples that I usually favor when it comes to kind of, you know, providing a sense of civic security, almost always have to do with, you know, useful information being provided to people who need it. And what I think is a little more problematic is sort of these exhortatory, if that's a word, ... communication that is sort of like you know, suggesting you sort of like do something or behave a certain way. So, for instance, I think one of the things that make the New York subway system great is that it has a really resilient, well-thought through, well-maintained sign system. You know, that's actually, just telling you, you know, when you get off a subway station, it will say, this is the northeast corner, that's the southwest corner, etc., etc., and you don't find that in every subway station, every subway system in the world. And I think the New York one which has been a plan, you know, based on a plan that has stayed fairly much intact since the late 60's, is really quite nice. You know, on the other hand, you sort of can raise example of the signs that say, "If you see something, say something," usually with a picture, a staged picture, of like a bag underneath a bench. And you know, I'm sure that someone is, you know, that there's a task force somewhere that decided in a conference room, and they said, well you know, here's our you know, twelve-step plan you know, about how we're going to address the ever-growing threat of terrorism, the ever-growing possibilities of you know, of people attacking, you know, crowded, urban centers like subway stations or whatever, and you know we're going to employ this many more foot-police, we're going to do this, we're going to do that, and we're also going to do this campaign suggesting that citizens, you know, be more watchful.

So I, I'm sure that that has a logic to it, and I'm not sure it actually, you know, I don't think as, in and of itself, it sort of raises people's anxiety level. I'm also not sure in and of itself, it actually you know, that those things alone actually make people more inclined to react with suspicion to things like that, you know? You know, I think that you know, just as an artifact of early twenty-first century life, you know, and the way you know, I mean I've heard that phrase, "you see something, you say something," kind of used all sorts of ways, ironically kind of the use being, you know, transferred into the art world and into all these other worlds, as well. So I think it's become almost, at least around New York, kind of a catch-phrase that's come to transcend its original intention, to a certain degree. And you know, I've sort of you know, I've actually, you know, the only thing I, the only thing it has done for me is I'm sort of, I'm the kind of person who used to cheerfully just kind of like throw down my carry-on bag at an airport and then wander you know, minutes-walk away to buy a cup of coffee, then come back thinking, who's going to take my bag, and who cares if they take smelly socks, anyway. Now the prospect of you know, the bag being surrounded by you know, dogs and people like that, sort of, I mean, I think sort of it's just one thing that plays into a heightened sense of insecurity that people actually, a lot of what makes the world go round is people's willing suspension of acknowledging, you know, the near constant danger that we're all in. The same way we all, you know, sort of willfully ignore the fact that we're all going to die and all kinds of other things.

You know, you just have to somehow go on, and you know having, being a New Yorker and having, you know, lived here in 2001, that was sort of like you know, the events of September that year, really resonated to a point where it took a long time for people to, sort of, like, settle back down and realize, no it's, you know, life is going to go on somehow, you know? And what's funny is that one of them, because we had been working before, and during, and after, with the business development district in lower Manhattan, one of the things we were asked to do was sort of remediate the signage down there to deal with the new conditions which were completely paralyzing, and to me that sort of was one of the things that actually, we did a little survey and showed all these handmade, spray-painted signs, "Keep Out", "This Road Closed", "Go This Way." It just kind of created into a real post-apocalyptic landscape down there. We did some Photoshop, replaced them just with some kind of like standardized-looking signs that kind of had a kind of calmer, more informational tone that looked like they were professionally done, and actually changed sort of the way that things looked down there.

So to a certain degree it sort of was, I think people welcomed a sense of greater control, you know it's that loss, that sense that everything was out of control, that nothing would ever be under control again, that actually made people really feel insecure. And so I think, again, more than just sort of ad campaigns, you know, or colored charts saying what the threat level is, I think that actually, just sort of information, kind of soberly and effectively, and forthrightly presented, is the best medicine for these things.

HS: I was really hoping to go into that example further and talk more about that period. From your perspective, given the things that you think about and focus on in your work, and I can tell you're passionate about it, what were the images of the events that you see having had a large impact on people, you know, in the way that they perceived what was going on around them? As you were saying, what example is sort of the haphazard signage...

MB: Yeah, well you know, in the Fall of 2001, for weeks and even months, you know, all those handmade "Lost" posters, you know, people who you know, back when it still seemed that the people who disappeared on September 11th would somehow miraculously show up later, you know, there were all these posters hanging up everywhere, just with faces and things. And so that's all, that's people actually using you know, the same tools of graphic design and advertising that, you know, that commercial entities do, you know, for their own ads, in a public space, and what was also quite interesting was, you know, the degree of tolerance there was about those things. You know, places that previously would've just torn them down right away to just kind of keep everything looking nice, there was an amount of respect that was accorded those things, you know? And a question about what would really happen with those things, makeshift sort of memorials and things like that, you know, around firehouses, police stations, or even with, you know, non-uniformed or non-first responder citizens, would sort of have the same thing. And you know, I think part of New York as a media capital, sort of reacted like a media, you know, communication became like a very big thing in those days, you know? And to a certain degree still is, but I think you know, it was remarkable how sort of public New York felt back then, as a, sort of as a result of that in the immediate days after the World Trade Center attacks.

HS: What are the examples that you cited on the blog, was that the days after 9/11, especially places like Times Square and other advertising hubs, were totally awash, not with advertisements, but with sort of as you, and I'm going to quote the blog because you put it very well. "They were replaced by empty and eerily unattributed exhortations like 'United We Stand'", the effect was Orwellian.

MB: Yeah. I have to admit, I like capitalism. You know, not as a way to become a rich fat cat, because if I liked it in that way I wouldn't be a graphic designer, trust me. But I like it as a way, actually, to make people kind of, you know, when its at its best people, I think, I think it's, at its heart of capitalism there's a form of competition and in a competitive media environment I think people increasingly are able to communicate, you know, the bar actually, as high as it gets lifted, still, because of things like YouTube, desktop publishing, all these things... you know, the means of production that used to just really used to be isolated in a few people now we're extending it to a lot of people. And I think, you know, if you go to a place like Times Square, let's say, there was a movement in the late 80's to sort of clean up Times Square, quote unquote. And, in fact, there were some plans put forward that basically sort of thought, well, we all like Rockefeller Center, so what we should really do is figure out a way to take this horrible shithole called Times Square and make it look like Rockefeller Center. And a developer came forward with a plan of these really nice masonry buildings, not so really nice masonry buildings, but sort of replaced all of the cacophony of Times Square, which is a lot of office buildings, and wouldn't that be nice.

And then sort of oddly in the nick of time, there was sort of a public and a, you know, in the general public and also in the planning community in New York, someone thought, well maybe Times Square kind of matured enough that it sort of seemed like something that sort of should be just left to be Times Square. And so this counter proposal came up that had to do with kind of retaining it so that somehow it would be, you know, it would still feel somehow like Times Square, right? And I think that the, what makes Times Square Times Square isn't just signs and lights, you know, but it's all signs and lights that are all selling you things. You know, selling you broadway shows, selling you soda pop, selling you blue jeans, you know? But they're all selling you things, and you go into it and you understand that's what it's all about. And that's sort of what makes it, if you look at pictures of it, pictures of New York, you know, going back to the beginning part of the 20th century, it sort of looks, it's a lower tech version of the same thing, you know?

And, you know, Kurt Andersen has a book called "Heyday" out right now where it's about New York and America, and the world in 1848, which sort of, which he locates as sort of very kind of starting point of what we think of, a lot of things we'd think of as modern today. Including commerce, advertising, things like that, and you know indeed, how thrilling and exuberant it all was to someone who just kind of felt that things had been sleepy and unprogressive before then. So I think particularly, I remember in, you know, in Autumn of 2001, all of this and it seemed kind of inappropriate to be selling blue jeans, you know, given that, you know, America has just been rocked by those kind of attacks, and you know, people withdrew their advertising and put up signs saying, you know, United We Stand, and I would just rather see an underwear ad, I swear to God, I really would. At least you know, you know, you're not being asked to agree with it, you know? You'd say, well you know, fuck you and fuck your underwear. It's fine. But there's something about United We Stand, an eagle, and the American flag, that I think is really, you know, sort of inherently kind of has a coercive quality to it that I don't think any advertising out there does. Advertising at the end of the day sort of, you know, as inescapable as it seems, it really is something you can kind of opt out of, you know? But I don't think it has something about, you know, unattributed public messages coming from Your Country, capital Y, capital C, you know do seem like, "Agree with this or put your citizenship in question," you know? So in a way there's this funny line between again, the cold, brutal light of late capitalism at least has a kind of bracing clarity to it that I think, you know, love it or hate it, or disagree with it or relish it, you sort of are more likely to know where you stand with it. Now there's a counter-argument any intelligent, informed person can mount to that, that had to do with actually untangling who owns what corporation and how few media companies actually control the media, etc., etc. And given... I think that just has to do with you know, again, sort of the, that has to do with private companies actually behaving more like world governments or, as they like sometimes, even world religions sort of, you know? So I think the best news is that, you know more than ever, I think individual citizens, you know, have the means to actually respond to that using, in kind in a way, you know, through the technological media that are available now that weren't available even a few years ago.

HS: What role do you think the sort of unattributed, or why, you know, ubiquitous symbols of patriotism played in the ways people made their decisions about how they felt about the country, about how they felt about American foreign policy, about you know, domestic policy in terms of the Patriot Act and things like that? Do you think that the images that were put out there were merely a reflection of the same things that were coming from the same source, or do you think that they came back around and helped really sustain the way people felt, the way that people were responding patriotically?

MB: I think people just sort of want... what makes them secure, if you want to get back to that, is sort of simple narratives. They like simple narratives. You know, they like the simple explanation as opposed to the really complicated, murky explanation, you know? And sort of, my country, I grew up... I remember my dad telling me what's great about America's that we never started a fight with another country, we've only just gone in to help people. And at the time he told me that it was more or less true. You know, and that was before Vietnam and certainly before this stuff that's going on now. But I have to admit it was a simple truth, it was really, really, to my second grade self, it was really a comforting thing. You sort of felt like there was this really simple sort of like, you know, narrative that kind of informed all of American history, whether or not that...and that wasn't true in the Mexican-American war, there were all kinds of instances where it wasn't even true, and so reality is much more confusing than that, but I think people sort of intuitively just kind want the clarity of a simple narrative. You know, I guess it's interesting, the same way that I would say that, you know, design when it's providing clarity, and to a certain degree simplicity, in terms of choices for people, I think in public policy or in, you know, large kind of civic decisions that need to be made, that same sort of reductive simplicity--an exit sign in a movie theater, let's say--isn't quite as easy to achieve, and people who are, who claimed to achieved it, often have done it just by editing out a lot of things that are, you know, inconvenient to the argument, but maybe not inessential to it.

HS: The last question I'd like to ask is about a piece you wrote a couple years ago, I know I keep coming up with old posts of yours, but you wrote in 2005, in September, 2005, about Ellsworth Kelly's response to the idea of a 9/11 memorial that he had actually made two years prior. So now we're two years again ahead of that, we've had a couple spaces here, and your point is that you thought Ellsworth Kelly's proposal to have a mere, just a green field, a field of grass at the site of the Trade Center, was dawning on you as a good, as a better idea, maybe the most appropriate way of achieving it. And now that we're two years even further from that, we see that there's this plan for an enormous tower, it's called the Freedom Tower, and it's intended to sort of go to all of these places for us, how do you feel about that now? How do you feel about what that tower is intended to say about that experience and about this country?

MB: Yeah, well I think the... there's been a lot of writing to had to... well, let me go back. You know, I mean sort of one of the most interesting moments as a designer for me, and I think a lot of people in the design community in New York happened, in the days after 9/11, when there was a public debate about what should be done with that site, what kind of... should buildings be put there? What kind of buildings should be put there? And it really, it was funny because it just got as absolutely as convoluted as it can be, sort of, you know, and it's funny because there's a couple of... what a lot of people keep coming back to is that different cities have different raisons d'etre, but New York's is makin' money, really, you know? And it was founded by Dutch people who moving here to make money, and in fact it was sort of like a very sort of accepting of anyone who wanted to come here, you could be of any nationality, religious belief, race, as long as you were willing to kind of get with the program and kind of help make some money here, ya know? And basically everything, the commissioner's plan of 1803 I think it was, that laid out the grid thing, that was just about efficiency, how can we kind of maximize the efficient use of all the land in this island all the way up? They did this amazing thing where they just thought, Oh, screw it, it can't all be this grid, let's make a park in the middle somewhere. So they carved out Central Park never knowing that it would actually be isolated as this field of green in the midst of all this building, but that's sort of, in 1803 that seemed like a fairly remote possibility. And then suddenly to all of a sudden have you know, whatever it is, nineteen acres of land suddenly, not really up for grabs because all different people had different legitimate claims on it: the guy who... the landlord, the City, the citizens of New York, people who spoke for the American soul, all people sort of saying, what we do on this land is important, meaningful. And you know, indeed, architects who, I think, much more than graphic designers, deal in a way with emotion and with symbology of a sort, you know, were challenged to really figure out what the appropriate response was on that site. And I think it sort of has been a really long, winding road, and a confusing one, one that I think is you know, one that is a story that is still in the middle of it, and one that I think is... one of the things I think is so confusing specifically about New York as an urban center is that it's, people's expectations... the early reviews of places are almost always turned around. Rockefeller Center was sort of thought to be a debacle when it was built, and now it's beloved as a model of how urbanism should be done. The Chrysler building was just thought to be ludicrous, and now it's picture postcard view of what romantic New York's all about. And you know, one of my favorite parts is upper Sixth Avenue, which is a bunch of featureless buildings that to me really look like it's the opening scenes from "North by Northwest," you know, it looks like my idea of the New York I wanted to move to, and so I think until it's actually living and inhabited, it's going to be hard to judge what the success is and the meaning is of lower Manhattan. You still have people who want to figure out a way to make money out of it, people want to make a better city out of it, people want to honor the martyred, fallen there? You know? And it's not often you have civic land, civic area that's so disputed in terms of what people's expectations are, but sort of the ajudication of that, as bruising as it's going to be, is only going to really be sorted out maybe in 10 more years.