On a misty April morning in Lower Manhattan, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels stood atop the roof of an old brick building, the collar of his black coat popped against the chill, shooting a promotional film for what would become the defining commission of his young career: the design for Two World Trade Center. At the time, the project remained a work in progress, and his primary client—media titan Rupert Murdoch—had yet to give his final approval. Yet the hyper-eloquent 40-year-old let no doubt interfere with his vision. Having obsessed over every line and image, he told his director that he wanted viewers to swoon.
While Murdoch’s plan to relocate his companies was still one of the worst-kept secrets in New York real estate, Ingels could hardly contain his excitement. Between takes, he pointed toward a void in the densely packed Manhattan skyline, tracing the profile of a skyscraper only he could see. From this specific vantage point, his design resembled a stack of seven distinct blocks, ascending like a grand staircase toward One World Trade Center, its monolithic neighbor.
"In a way, it is almost like a physical manifestation of the spirit of America," Ingels remarked, invoking the nation’s motto. "Out of many, one."
If completed, the tower would stand among the tallest buildings in New York City, serving as the final piece in the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center site. The architectural ensemble rings two cascading pools that pay tribute to the nearly 3,000 people who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Yet Ingels was not focused on looking backward; he was focused on making his own history. "The memorial is about the memorial," he noted. "The tower should be about the living city."
Ingels is fond of describing architecture as "the art of turning fiction into fact." He possesses a multitude of talents—as a draftsman, a salesman, and a charming cultivator of his own dynamic public image—but his greatest asset is an innate gift for storytelling. He excels at constructing a compelling narrative around the most rigorous practical necessities, often pushing his designs in brilliantly fantastical directions.
For instance, he oversaw the construction of a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen featuring a slanted roof designed to double as a recreational ski slope, complete with a smokestack engineered to puff a symbolic ring of steam each time a ton of carbon dioxide is emitted. For a proposed expansion of Google’s campus in Mountain View, California, Ingels—collaborating with Thomas Heatherwick—conceived an elaborate complex of geodesic domes, envisioning a workplace culture centered on biking, hiking, and coding inside a sunlit glass terrarium.
Such imaginative flights have made Ingels internationally famous and highly sought-after at an age considered exceptionally precocious by traditional architectural standards. However, fame in architecture can be a deceptive indicator. An architect’s built work, much like the light of a distant star, often reaches the public eye only after a grueling, years-long journey through bureaucracy, engineering, and finance.
Ingels’ largest completed project in New York at the time, a striking pyramidal apartment building rising along the West Side Highway at 57th Street known as Via 57 West, was roughly one-third the size of Two World Trade Center. "At the moment we are working seriously on one of the most daunting buildings in downtown New York," Ingels acknowledged, "we still haven’t completed a skyscraper." With Two World Trade Center, he believed he had discovered a way to reinvent the high-rise work environment, transforming a structure that is inherently vertical and hierarchical into a space that fosters horizontal interaction. The arduous part, however, was proving that he could translate that captivating story into concrete reality.
Eclecticism on Demand
Ingels playfully refers to his firm as BIG, and his approach to architecture as "BIGamy." Rather than binding himself to a single, rigid aesthetic, he tailors his ideas flexibly to meet the specific demands of his clients—all in the service of producing designs unlike anything seen before.
To realize his vision for the World Trade Center, Ingels had to continually prove its economic and structural value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Rupert Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the veteran developer who has controlled much of the World Trade Center rebuilding effort. Before the $4 billion skyscraper could secure financing, Murdoch and Silverstein had to finalize a long-term lease.
"There’s a lot of drama with the deal right now," Ingels admitted during the film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be." Even if the principals reached an agreement, numerous other hazards loomed: a volatile real estate market, the unavoidable political melodrama of building on a site of mass tragedy, and the bureaucratic weight of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency that owns the underlying land.
For 14 years, these intertwined factors had kept the redevelopment process lurching forward unpredictably, crushing many architectural ambitions along the way. In fact, Ingels’ design directly displaced an earlier concept by Lord Norman Foster. (Turnabout is fair play: Foster had previously pushed aside Ingels on a library project in Kazakhstan.) To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had to balance the competing demands of Murdoch and Silverstein, who planned to market the upper half of the building as premium office space. At the same time, he had to manage a burgeoning portfolio of international clients eager to hire BIG. While a single triumphant building can establish an architect’s reputation, a single high-profile disaster can just as easily ruin it.
Ingels, who has never lacked bravado, insisted he relished the pressure, comparing the ordeal to a Zen exercise. "Turning the force of your enemy into your own strength," he called it.
Overcoming Inertia and Resistance
The first major force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center was institutional inertia. Silverstein initially believed he had a satisfactory design from Foster—who declined to comment for the original reporting—and harbored serious reservations about Ingels’ early sketches. The developer worried the stacked, offset structure would look asymmetrical, or even teetering, from certain angles.
"He just thought, like, could he see it fit in? No," Ingels recalled. "Was it a nice design for another place? Maybe, but not here."
Silverstein nearly walked away from the deal entirely, until endorsements from the architects behind other World Trade Center buildings ultimately changed his mind. Yet, on the day of the rooftop shoot, Ingels received word that Rupert Murdoch wanted to review the latest iterations of the design firsthand.
The following Monday, the principals gathered in a conference room overlooking the site. Typically unflaappable, Ingels was momentarily thrown off balance by the media mogul’s rapid-fire questioning. "It’s almost sort of like kangaroo boxing," Ingels remarked afterward back at his office. Murdoch’s central concern boiled down to a fundamental question: Why doesn’t it fall over?
With assistance from David Childs, the architect of One World Trade Center, Ingels explained that the leaning effect was a calculated optical illusion. The unorthodox stepped form of the building resulted from placing the inner core—which houses essential elevators—off-center, thereby creating expansive interior floor plates for newsrooms, outdoor terraces, and direct views of the plaza for Fox News studios. The explanation won Murdoch over.
"Before you get that story, most people suspect that it’s all just follies," Ingels noted. "The more blatantly the architect can explain why things are the way they are, the better."
Throughout the process, Ingels could count on a powerful ally: James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. It was the younger Murdoch who drove the initiative to relocate 21st Century Fox and News Corp. from their aging headquarters near Rockefeller Center.
"We sort of thought, ‘Let’s not hire a starchitect, let’s not build a big tower,’" James recalled. He initially desired an open, loft-like, creative workspace. Yet after exploring various potential sites across the city, they gravitated toward the World Trade Center—and toward Ingels, a star who understood their underlying desires. "We were struck by what a great problem solver he was," James said. "This is someone who can take a set of constraints and create something surprising and effective out of them."
Engineering Realities and Cost Pressures
The foremost constraint involved the remnants of Foster’s previous design. As a result of a political compromise between Silverstein and the Port Authority, Foster’s subterranean foundation had already been constructed to accommodate a $4 billion underground transportation hub. The remainder of the tower was meant to rise once an anchor tenant was secured. However, James Murdoch felt Foster’s conservative skyscraper did not suit a modern media company, and Ingels dismissed it as "a generic extrusion with a flashy hat."
Piggybacking a brand-new skyscraper onto a preexisting foundation created complex structural hurdles, particularly at the ground level where the tower’s immense weight had to be transferred onto existing supports. Whatever Ingels envisioned high in the air had to interface seamlessly with what was already anchored deep in the ground. This meant convincing yet another skeptical audience: Silverstein’s structural engineers.
Shortly after meeting with Murdoch, Ingels stood at a whiteboard in BIG’s offices, illustrating his structural philosophy. Most skyscrapers over a certain height tend toward a uniform square footprint, a generic form dictated by cost, leasing convenience, and wind-and-gravity engineering constraints. Ingels, however, believed he could redistribute the building’s mass differently.
Real-world complications quickly arose. Ingels’ project manager, Ute Rinnebach, returned from a meeting with the engineering team bearing difficult news: the proposed subterranean retrofitting, which involved shoring up walls and columns within the Port Authority’s domain, was prohibited. Altering those primary reinforcements risked destabilizing the entire structural scheme.
Simultaneously, a facade consultant delivered another blow. Ingels had planned to use thinner glass on parts of the building to reduce facade costs, which consultants estimated were running $60 million higher than Foster’s design. However, New York Police Department security standards mandated that all facades at the World Trade Center utilize heavy laminated safety glass to protect against potential explosions.
"I was like, fuck!" Ingels recalled. "Because that’s a piece of information that hadn’t reached me. I just thought I had an ace up my sleeve, which I didn’t, because the building has to be safe."
With Silverstein and Murdoch navigating a tense bargaining phase, any departure from standard formulas incurred heavy construction-cost premiums. "Right now," Ingels observed at the time, "the architecture is essentially held hostage."
Navigating the Tensions of Success
Despite weeks of uncertainty, Ingels managed to avert disaster by agreeing to a series of structural compromises. Walking through the World Trade Center plaza with Silverstein executives, the architect was praised by Janno Lieber, Silverstein’s second-in-command, for a remarkable turnaround that salvaged the core design.
Reflecting on the challenges, Ingels embraced an evolutionary metaphor. In nature, organisms face a choice between fight or flight; while innovation is often associated with fighting through obstacles, evolution frequently rewards the moment of flight—when an organism is forced to find a new route or territory. "In architecture," Ingels noted, "sometimes the eureka moment is actually when you give up a stance and say, OK, we have to try something else."
That pragmatic philosophy acknowledges a difficult reality of the profession: architects must learn to live with continuous defeats. In his 2009 manifesto, Yes Is More, Ingels estimated that out of 200 architectural designs produced in his firm’s first eight years, only 11 were actually built.
Fame has since improved those odds, connecting BIG with clients holding vast resources. Google, for instance, encouraged bold imagination, with CEO Larry Page famously telling Ingels that parking complications were "nothing that $50 million won’t solve." Even so, when local opposition in Mountain View subsequently denied development rights for a portion of the massive campus complex, even tech’s most influential company was forced to scale back.
Yet the pipeline of commissions continued to grow. In Manhattan alone, Ingels simultaneously worked on four major skyline additions and the Dryline—a $335 million hybrid park and flood defense system along the East River designed in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. In Washington, D.C., BIG took on a master plan for the Smithsonian Institution’s South Mall campus, while also fielding inquiries from professional sports franchises interested in stadium design.
"Coming here to America five years ago, we were given the opportunity to try to reimagine the skyscraper, which is one of the great inventions of American architecture," Ingels said. "I think the American football stadium would be an awesome thing to take on."
A Corporate Architect with Avant-Garde Roots
Having founded BIG in Copenhagen just a decade prior, Ingels’ meteoric rise confounded traditional expectations within an industry where careers typically build through decades of slow critical accrual.
"He has just bypassed all the rest of the avant-garde," said Preston Scott Cohen, an architect and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where Ingels has also taught. "No one has done it that fast, with that degree of success. You name them, he has just flown right over their heads."
Historically, museum-grade architecture was limited to civic projects, while profit-driven office buildings remained utilitarian and uninventive. Ingels insisted that BIG could be "both pragmatic and utopian," bringing artistic vision to commercial complexes and stadiums alike.
A disciple of legendary theorist Rem Koolhaas—having started his career at Koolhaas’ firm, OMA, in 1998—Ingels absorbed a fearless approach to placing ideas on any table. Yet while Koolhaas set out his ideas in provocative treatises like Delirious New York, he built little of note in the city itself. His student, by contrast, sought a far more tangible, built legacy.
"Why is it that imaginative architects that do surprising and beautiful and thought-provoking stuff can’t do the really big buildings that matter?" Ingels wondered aloud. Disdaining modernists whom he blamed for turning office buildings into "boring boxes," he nevertheless embraced a pragmatic flexibility, famously echoing Philip Johnson’s candid admission about the compromises required to build in the real world.
As BIG expanded to hundreds of employees across New York and Copenhagen, Ingels delegated authority to partners and a professional CEO while maintaining a deeply personalized creative culture. Returning to his New York office from European travels, he routinely plunged into a flurry of interventions—from reviewing concrete samples for residential facades to brainstorming alternative concepts for waterfront pavilions.
When reviewing Two World Trade Center designs with his team inside Silverstein’s headquarters, project manager Ute Rinnebach noted that the sloping columns designed to solve the foundation interface had become prohibitively expensive. Though Ingels worried straight columns would clutter the lower levels, he ultimately accepted the modification.
"I could live with that," Ingels concluded. "If we really want the truth, this is the truth. This is the truth in dollars."
As Janno Lieber stopped by to reiterate that cost remained the central hurdle, Ingels continued to refine the narrative, proposing warm materials like brass and cobblestones to soften the corporate tower and connect it to the history of New York.
Architects do not get to write their own fairy-tale endings, but Ingels remained content to operate within practical boundaries, viewing the realization of a skyscraper not as a pure sculptural exercise, but as a complex mathematical equation with multiple variables. Stepping out into the sunny Manhattan afternoon toward the World Trade Center site, he framed a box in the air with his hands and smiled.
"Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit," Ingels said. "I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
