From Studio 360's offices a half-mile away, you can still see and smell the smoke. Every day now, thousands of tons of rubble are being trucked away from the spot in lower Manhattan where the World Trade Center used to stand. And already New Yorkers are thinking and talking about what should happen there next.

The reconstruction conversation has begun.  It's a conversation about architectural beauty and architectural honesty, about the mythic power of a skyline, about appropriate memorials, about all kinds of abstract ideas and symbolism.

In other words, it's a conversation about culture.

And since we're New Yorkers, there is both a lot of ambivalence and a lot of strong opinions.

There's also an urgent practical side -- we are short on office space. Fifty thousand people need places to work.

Clip:
"My name is Celeste Howell.  I'm now unemployed. I had just gotten hired at the World Trade Center before it blew up. I think it should be just an office building. We have memorials in other areas. Maybe we should have a plaque. I don't think it should be too big of a reminder."

But when you ask most New Yorkers -- ordinary people on the street -- what we ought to do with those blasted 25 acres, they launch into more abstract discussions about emotion and symbol.

Clip:
"I think we need to rebuild on the site. I think to not do that would be like we're scared. We are scared and everybody is scared and the problem with building another tall building... I don't think it should be the World Trade Center exactly as it was, but something new. Maybe just one tower, one tall tower, but not to rebuild is to live in fear."

We're resolute, most of us, but we're also spooked. We only really understand now that those 100-story towers were monuments to American self-confidence, that they were political gestures and that rebuilding skyscrapers there will be an explicitly political act, an act of retaliation.

Clip:
"My name is officer Cadet. I'm a police officer with the NYPD. I think they should rebuild the World Trade Center as it is because if they don't it will be a slap in our face but if we rebuild it it's gonna be a slap in their face."

Clip:
"I think they should rebuild the whole thing exactly how it was, maybe a few stories higher, that would be the memorial in itself."

She's not the only one who wants to rebuild exact replicas of the twin towers, to create the comforting illusion that the city is just as it was before September 11th.

Which is an understandable impulse,  but also an impulse -- as the grief counselors might say -- of denial.

Paul Goldberger:
"You can't pretend that history didn't happen. It becomes a Disneyland reproduction if you build it exactly as it is. We can't make it a theme park. And to replicate the Trade Center exactly as it is denies the tragedy, in a way, and we can't do that."

Paul Goldberger is the architecture critic for The New Yorker magazine, and an influential chronicler of the physical city since 1975, back when the twin towers were brand new.

Goldberger:
"It's right that there be a scar. You can't do plastic surgery on the city and have no scar. That's not right somehow. In a way that dishonors what happened as much as doing nothing would dishonor what happened."

And some citizens would do just that -- nothing, or anyway, not anything as workaday and strenuously normal as office buildings. Again, the conversation returns, as it should, to honoring the dead.

Clip:
"Rebuild on the site? I don't think they should build another trade tower, I really don't, because it's scary. I think they should build a memorial, maybe a wall like they have with their names on it but not another trade center."

On the spot where a fanatic blew up an American building the last time, in Oklahoma City, a memorial now stands. And it is beautiful. There are standard components of memorial architecture: a pair of 4-story-high monumental gates, a reflecting pool a hundred yards long, serene lawns and plantings -- and the inspired part, 168 sculptures made of bronze and lighted glass, empty chairs or tombstones, one for each of the victims of that bombing.

The 3-acre Oklahoma City memorial was designed by a young architect named Hans Butzer.

In the year it's been open, a million people have visited the memorial, three times as many as they expected.

Butzer:
"About a quarter to almost a third of the site includes the footprint of the Alfred P. Murrah building. You know a lot of people aren't comfortable stepping on the footprint of the Murrah building where the chairs stand."

They're uncomfortable because of the death and destruction that occurred there, because it's now hallowed ground.

So the challenge ahead of us in New York is to try to satisfy the survivors as well as citizens generally. To satisfy proud and tough-minded Americans as well as heartbroken and speechless ones. People who need work space and people who yearn for some heroic icon and people who are, frankly, nervous.

Goldberger:
"I think the impulse to build tall, to build high, is one that I understand, and as one who loves skyscrapers, supports. On the other hand, it's true that people will be very hesitant to work on that particular plot of land high, high up in the sky, and it's not gonna be an easy sell."

Paul Goldberger has a good idea for a way out of this dilemma.

Goldberger:
"As these couple of weeks have evolved, my own thinking has moved more and more toward the notion of building something very, very tall to honor the fact that these were the tallest buildings in New York, but not to make it an office tower. To build some kind of spire in effect that would be a memorial.

Kurt: So that maybe the offices would be up to the 50th story, but another 100 stories.

PG: Precisely -- something that would go much, much higher as a pure tower."

A super-tall tower with no humans in the top 1000 feet, or so. It would satisfy the American high-rise romantics among us, but it would also be prudent, discretion being the better part of valor.

But it seems to me we need to do something more to memorialize the nightmare.  Something, maybe, literal and horribly real.

Clip:
"Dumore Brown. I'm a writer I live in Brooklyn. I think the way Rome is would be a nice way to keep it the way they have it, not the way they have it right now. Clean it up a little. I think that should be left alone. I'd like to see it just ruins for a while."

Goldberger:
"I think that some piece of the buildings themselves that remain, some of those twisted pieces of the facade would be a very profoundly moving memorial and have to be part of whatever larger composition is put together there."

In other words we need to resist the urge to clean up the ghastly mess completely, to make the corner of Church and Liberty Streets uscarred. In Oklahoma City, they kept some of the wreckage so that the memorial experience is not too serene.

Butzer:
"We made a conscious effort to allow the jagged edges, the two remaining walls of the Murrah building's eastern edge, along the southern edge were the rough jagged concrete and rebar so these really became very low-key edges at the perimeter of the memorial room. And so they certainly provide evidence to a sense of the destruction caused by that bombing."

I'm betting it will be 2006 or 2008 before new office towers rise and a memorial is finished. So the question is what we can do right now to commemorate the horror and the heroism and even the buildings themselves in some apt, spectacular way?

In the days just after September 11th, a pair of New York artists and a pair of New York architects independently had the perfect idea. They would install massive floodlights or lasers on the ground, near where the trade center stood. At night, the two towers would come back to life as shining ghosts, pure towers of light rising a hundred stories into the sky. Visible maybe 100 miles away.

Goldberger:
"I think it's an idea as brilliantly simple, elegantly simple and natural as the Vietnam Memorial. It's exactly right symbolically. It could be done quickly. It would be a wonderful way to make a short-term immediate statement that we are not, in fact, cowed by the tragic events that have occurred, that we're not destroyed, and that the towers remain in people's minds as a very powerful image."

I'm hopeful that the Towers of Light will actually happen.

And I'm hopeful that the conversation that's just begun, about what and how to rebuild, will be large and intense and wide-ranging.

Hans Butzer says that in the case of the memorial he designed with his wife Torrey, the journey was at least as important as the destination.

Butzer:
"The discussions which take place, I would argue, are so crucial to our ability to deal with this tragedy or at least begin to and so, what we've seen in the case of Oklahoma City is that the process this forum of discussion that was created really became more important than the actual construction of the memorial."

This is Kurt Andersen, in Studio 360.