Nice thought

It would be nice if the planners of Ground Zero’s reconstruction adopted an attitude that has become more common among architects in recent years: humbly pick the style that’s “right for the job,” then adhere to it with some deference to that style’s internal, traditional rules. As the Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman says, we want buildings to please their users, not help architects make a philosophical point—a self-indulgent tendency in 20th-century architecture that reached its reductio ad absurdum with the “deconstructionist” architects, who deliberately designed buildings that no one would want to live in.

It’ll never work.