Time & Perspective Quote by Daniel Libeskind

"Fantastic responsibility" is Libeskind’s kind of double vision: awe and burden fused into one phrase, the way his buildings try to fuse emotion and structure. As an architect whose reputation is tied to memory-work (most famously the Jewish Museum Berlin and the World Trade Center master plan), he understands that certain commissions aren’t just jobs; they’re public rituals. When he calls it a "wonderful moment", he’s not dodging the gravity so much as asserting that gravity can be generative. The wonder is permission to build at the scale of collective feeling.

The wording is carefully diplomatic. "Fantastic" flirts with spectacle, but the noun it modifies is "responsibility", not "opportunity" or "freedom". That’s a tell. Libeskind is positioning himself against the starchitect stereotype of ego-first form-making, emphasizing stewardship: the architect as custodian of a story that isn’t his. It’s also a pre-emptive defense against the inevitable backlash that comes with symbolic projects: if the building is going to stand for something, it will be judged for what it means, not just how it looks.

Subtext: architecture, at its most consequential, is a moral act carried out with budgets, zoning codes, and deadlines. He’s framing the moment as both privilege and obligation, a way to signal ambition without sounding reckless. In the post-9/11, post-memorial era of design culture, that balance is the whole game.