For reasons that are obscure to some of us, it seems to be the conventional, almost the polite, and surely the prudent thing to express dismay and indignation at the ongoing “fiasco” of Lower Manhattan. As many people will be happy to remind you on this inauspicious morning, five years have passed and still nothing has been built at the site where once stood the twin towers of the World Trade Center.

But that is not true. For one thing, a rebuilt 7 World Trade Center, though not actually part of the 16 acres that comprised the towers and the plaza that surrounded them, has arisen to surprisingly successful designs by David Childs of SOM. More important, it is naïve to imagine that a building comes into being when the first brick or girder is put in place. In fact, most of the work goes into designing the structure and corralling the many competing interests and constituencies, all of which must precede the actual construction. Five years after the cataclysm, we have a masterplan, by Daniel Libeskind, that is looking increasingly good, as well as the final, or nearly final, designs for the transit hub, the memorial, and four of the five buildings that will surround it.

More materially, perhaps, the public fret over delay and inaction misunderstands the way things get done around here. Everything takes time. Everything has to be debated to death. The bigger the project, the greater the outcry, intelligent or otherwise, that is sure to arise from a querulous citizenry. Columbus Circle and that stretch or the Far West Side that now contains Trump Place lay destitute for a generation while concerned citizens, bristling with principles, endeavored to insure that nothing ever got done. That five years should have passed before everything was set to go at ground zero is not an unduly long delay, either in the context of New York or of architectural history in general.

Indeed, many of the structures we most revere, from Saint Peter’s and Chartres to the Campidoglio and Versailles, were the labor of decades if not centuries. The architectural evolution of ground zero might be compared to climbing a steep hill: In prospect it seems an impossible distance, but in retrospect it looks like a brief jaunt. Five years have passed since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and yet it does not seem so very long ago. Five years hence, if all goes to plan, the memorial and most of the buildings at ground zero will be inhabited and the rest of it will be approaching completion.

Most remarkable of all, perhaps, is the way in which a largely successful design has evolved out of a clamorous process that often seemed preprogrammed for failure. The protracted spectacle of a public competition, press conferences, and citizen forums reminds one of that old vaudeville shtick of the waiter who trips, stumbles, and trips again, only to deliver the content of his tray, intact, to the very table for which it was intended all along. Against all the odds, despite all the competing interests, all the bombast and contributions from seven very different architectural personalities, there is good reason to believe, after last Thursday’s announcement of the plans for Towers 2, 3, and 4, that the composite of ground zero will be one of the more successful public spaces in the city, perhaps in the world.

How good? It is too early to say, but I increasingly believe that it will stand favorable comparison with Manhattan’s three other grand projects, Columbia University, Lincoln Center, and Rockefeller Center. Though the designs of the buildings, as shown thus far, do not represent the very summit of architectural striving, they are really rather good and appear to be better, both individually and collectively, than the structures that occupy the campuses of Lincoln Center and Rockefeller Center. Obviously it is impossible, at a time when almost nothing has been realized, to know how it will feel to stand at the center of the site, amid the memorial pools, gazing up at the proud towers that encircle it in that spiraling embrace that is the most inspired part of Mr. Libeskind’s design. But it certainly seems as though the right balance will be struck between mass and void, between presence and absence, between nature and art.

This result has largely been achieved by cozening the public into believing it had a role to play in determining the ultimate outcome. In fact, the one personality who emerges most eminently in the evolution of ground zero is Larry Silverstein, the much-reviled developer of the site. Somehow, through arrogant and assertive self-confidence allied to a stubborn underhandedness, he has managed to outfox governors and mayors as well as an angry but largely inattentive public. In the process, he will get most, if not all, of the millions of square feet of office space that he passionately desired. But the citizens of New York will get a public space not only worthy in itself, but also far better than the much missed, though ultimately imperfect, twin towers it is destined to replace.