On a misty April day in Lower Manhattan, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels stood high above a cobblestoned street on the roof of an old brick building, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped. The 40-year-old was shooting a promotional film for what would become the most important commission of his young career: his design for the skyscraper known as Two World Trade Center. At the time, the project was still a work in progress, and his primary client—the media magnate Rupert Murdoch—had yet to formally sign off.
Despite the uncertainty, Ingels did not let doubt slow him down. He had obsessed over every line and image, telling his director that he wanted viewers to swoon. While Murdoch’s plan to relocate his media companies remained one of New York real estate’s best-kept secrets, Ingels was ready to shout the news from the rooftops. Between takes, he pointed to a void in the densely packed Manhattan skyline, tracing the profile of a skyscraper that only he could see. From that vantage point, his design resembled a stack of seven blocks, ascending like a 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 said. "Out of many, one."
If completed, the tower would stand among the tallest buildings in New York City and serve as the final addition to the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center site. The architectural ensemble rings two cascading pools that honor the roughly 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But Ingels 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 saying that architecture is "the art of turning fiction into fact." He possesses many talents—as a draftsman, a salesman, and a charismatic cultivator of his own public image—but his greatest asset is a gift for storytelling: an ability to weave a compelling narrative around practical necessities. Often, his designs lean in fantastical directions. He designed a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen featuring a slanted roof that doubles as a recreational ski slope, complete with a smokestack engineered to puff a symbolic ring of steam each time it emits a ton of carbon dioxide. For a proposed expansion of Google’s campus in Mountain View, California, Ingels—collaborating with designer Thomas Heatherwick—envisioned an elaborate complex of geodesic domes, imagining a lifestyle of biking, hiking, and coding inside a sunlit glass terrarium.
Such imaginative flights have made Ingels famous, and highly sought-after, at an age considered precocious by the standards of architecture. Yet fame can be a deceptive indicator in his profession, where an architect’s built work often takes years to reach completion. Ingels’ largest project to date at the time, a pyramidal apartment building rising along Manhattan’s 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, noting that he had not yet completed a skyscraper. With Two World Trade Center, he believed he had discovered a way to reinvent the high-rise work environment, transforming a form that is traditionally vertical and hierarchical into a space for horizontal interaction. The laborious part, however, was proving he could translate that captivating story into hard reality.
Eclecticism on Demand
Ingels playfully refers to his firm as BIG, and his flexible approach to architecture as "BIGamy." Rather than adhering to a single, rigid aesthetic, he tailors his ideas to meet the distinct demands of his clients—all in service of creating designs unlike anything seen before.
To realize the Two World Trade Center design, however, Ingels had to continually prove its value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Rupert Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the developer controlling much of the World Trade Center rebuilding effort. Murdoch and Silverstein had to agree on a long-term lease to finance the $4 billion skyscraper.
"There’s a lot of drama with the deal right now," Ingels said during the film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be."
Even if the parties reached an agreement, other hazards loomed: a volatile real estate market, the political sensitivities surrounding building on a site of mass tragedy, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the lumbering transportation agency that owns the land beneath the complex. For 14 years, these factors had conspired to make the redevelopment lurch forward unpredictably, derailing many architectural ambitions. Ingels’ design had actually displaced an earlier concept by Lord Norman Foster. To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had to balance the competing demands of Murdoch and Silverstein while managing the influx of new business arriving at BIG.
The first hurdle Ingels faced at the World Trade Center was simple inertia. Silverstein believed he had a solid design from Foster and harbored serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings, fearing the stacked structure would look asymmetrical or teetering from certain perspectives. He nearly rejected the concept until receiving endorsements from the architects behind other World Trade Center buildings.
Shortly after, Ingels faced a high-stakes review with Rupert Murdoch himself. Gathering in a conference room overlooking the site, Ingels was tested by the media mogul’s rapid-fire questioning. Murdoch’s primary concern was structural: Why wouldn’t it fall over? With assistance from David Childs, the architect of One World Trade Center, Ingels explained that the leaning effect was an optical illusion. The unorthodox stepped form resulted from placing the structural core off-center, which simultaneously generated expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, outdoor terraces, and views of the plaza for Fox News studios. Murdoch was sold.
Ingels also found a vital internal ally in James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. James had been the driving force behind the decision to relocate 21st Century Fox and News Corp. from an aging building near Rockefeller Center. Initially seeking a modest, loft-like creative workspace without a "starchitect," James ultimately gravitated toward the World Trade Center and praised Ingels as a master problem-solver who could turn constraints into surprising and effective designs.
Overcoming Structural and Security Hurdles
The primary constraint involved the remnants of Foster’s previous design. As part of a political compromise between Silverstein and the Port Authority, Foster’s foundation had already been constructed to accommodate a $4 billion underground transportation hub. Piggybacking a new skyscraper onto that existing foundation created severe engineering challenges, particularly in the lower floors and lobby, where the tower’s weight needed to shift onto preexisting supports.
Ingels had to convince Silverstein’s engineers that his unconventional massing could work. When project manager Ute Rinnebach returned from a meeting with engineers, the news was discouraging: reinforcing or altering walls within the Port Authority’s domain was forbidden, threatening to unravel the entire structural scheme. Furthermore, a facade consultant delivered another blow. Ingels had planned to use a thinner, more cost-effective glass product for parts of the facade, but learned that New York Police Department security standards mandated heavy laminated safety glass across all World Trade Center facades to protect against explosions.
As negotiations between Silverstein and Murdoch grew tense, any deviation from standard construction formulas carried a heavy financial penalty. For weeks, the fate of the project remained in doubt as Ingels sought to resolve structural issues without ruining the design. Eventually, he agreed to a series of necessary structural modifications, preserving the building’s core identity while satisfying the engineers.
By June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch paved the way to publicly unveil the design for Two World Trade Center. Before the public launch, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the architect who authored the master plan for the reassembled World Trade Center complex. In BIG’s conference room, Ingels presented a glowing model of the tower, explaining how the design respected Libeskind’s original vision, including the plaza known as the Wedge of Light, and resolved foundation alignment challenges with an array of diagonal columns.
Libeskind endorsed the project with a slap on the table, declaring it a "super building." However, Libeskind and other industry veterans noted that unveiling the design was only the first step. Between the initial rendering and the final stone lay the realities of urban development: economics, politics, and shifting market demands.
Despite ongoing design adjustments—including a minor reduction in height and occasional critiques from neighboring developers like Douglas Durst—BIG continued to expand its footprint in New York and globally. Alongside the World Trade Center commission, Ingels’ firm tackled multiple major skyline additions, the $335 million Dryline flood defense project along the East River, and a master plan for the Smithsonian Institution’s South Mall campus in Washington, DC.
Reflecting on his rapid ascent, Ingels remained philosophical about the setbacks and compromises inherent in his profession. Whether navigating corporate negotiations, engineering limitations, or client demands, he viewed architecture not as an exercise in uncompromised ego, but as the art of turning complex equations and practical boundaries into reality. Standing near the World Trade Center site, looking toward where the new skyscraper would rise, Ingels remained characteristically optimistic about the road ahead.
