WTC Design Finalists Are Cutting Edge, Not Confrontational

"What happened? First, the public seems to have been galvanized by a sense that an exceptional event demands exceptional architecture if it is going to be properly remembered and commemorated, and was thus perhaps more receptive to the unfamiliar. Second, the architects had a sense of occasion. What came through in their Dec. 17 presentations was that the moral import of the assignment had forced them into the most serious kind of professional soul-searching... The forms of Mr. Libeskind's and THINK's architecture are indeed unusual, even radical. But their intent as artists is reconciliation, not alienation, and the public has intuitively grasped--and embraced--this now radical concept."