On a misty April day in Lower Manhattan, Bjarke Ingels stood on the roof of an old brick building, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped, shooting a promotional film about the defining commission of his career: the 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—media magnate Rupert Murdoch—had yet to formally sign off. Yet the hyper-eloquent, 40-year-old Danish architect did not let doubt stand in the way of his vision. He had obsessed over every line and image, telling his director that he wanted viewers to swoon. At that moment, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his media companies remained one of New York real estate’s best-kept secrets, but Ingels was eager to broadcast the news from the rooftops.
Between takes, Ingels pointed to a void in the densely packed Manhattan skyline, tracing the profile of a skyscraper that only he could see. From this perspective, 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," he said. "Out of many, one."
If completed, the tower would stand among the tallest buildings in New York City and serve as the final structure envisioned in the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center site. The ensemble was designed to ring two cascading pools paying tribute to the roughly 3,000 people who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But Ingels was not focused on the tragedy; he wanted to make 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 boasts many talents—as a draftsman, a salesman, and a charming cultivator of his own winning image—but his greatest asset is a gift for storytelling: an ability to construct a narrative around practical necessities. Often, his designs careen in fantastical directions. He built a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen featuring a slanted roof that doubles as a recreational ski slope, complete with a smokestack designed 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 and collaborator Thomas Heatherwick created an elaborate complex of geodesic domes, envisioning a lifestyle of biking, hiking, and coding beneath 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 work, much like the light of a star, only reaches the eye after a years-long journey. His largest project to date at the time, a striking pyramidal apartment building 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 still had not completed a skyscraper. With Two World Trade Center, however, he believed he had discovered a way to create a new kind of high-rise work environment—one that transformed a fundamentally vertical and hierarchical form into a space for horizontal interaction. The laborious part would be proving he could translate that captivating narrative into hard facts on the ground.
Eclecticism on Demand
Ingels playfully calls his firm BIG, and his approach to architecture "BIGamy." Rather than adhering to a single aesthetic, he tailors his ideas to meet client demands, all in service of designs unlike anything seen before.
To realize his design, Ingels had to continually prove its value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the developer controlling much of the World Trade Center rebuilding. Murdoch and Silverstein still needed 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 on the day of 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 melodrama inherent in building on a site of mass murder, and an often inflexible government embodied by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency owning the land beneath the complex.
For 14 years, these factors had conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching unpredictably, leveling many an architectural ambition. In fact, Ingels’s design displaced an earlier proposal by Lord Norman Foster. To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had to balance the conflicting demands of Murdoch and Silverstein, who planned to market the top half of the building as office space, while juggling a wave of new clients. His dazzlingly swift rise inspired awe and envy among peers, but in architecture, it takes only one disaster to ruin a reputation.
The first force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center was institutional inertia. Silverstein initially believed he had a perfectly good design from Foster and harbored serious concerns about Ingels’s early drawings, fearing the stacked structure would look asymmetrical or teetering from certain perspectives. Silverstein almost rejected the deal entirely until endorsements from the architects of other World Trade Center buildings changed his mind.
Shortly after, Ingels faced a high-stakes review with Rupert Murdoch himself. Gathering in a conference room overlooking the site, Ingels was met with rapid-fire questioning from the media mogul. Murdoch’s primary concern boiled down to a fundamental question: Why doesn’t it fall over?
Assisted by David Childs, the architect of One World Trade Center, Ingels explained that the leaning effect was an illusion. The unorthodox stepped form resulted from placing the structural core—which houses elevators—off-center, creating expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, views of the plaza for Fox News studios, and outdoor terraces. Murdoch was ultimately sold.
"Before you get that story, most people suspect that it’s all just follies," Ingels said. "The more blatantly the architect can explain why things are the way they are, the better."
Ingels also counted on a powerful ally in James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. James was the driving force behind the decision to relocate 21st Century Fox and News Corp. from an aging building near Rockefeller Center.
"We sort of thought, ‘Let’s not hire a starchitect, let’s not build a big tower,’" James recalled, noting he initially wanted an open, loftlike workspace. Yet after exploring potential sites, he arrived at the World Trade Center and chose Ingels. "We were struck by what a great problem solver he was. This is someone who can take a set of constraints and create something surprising and effective out of them."
Those constraints included remnants of Foster’s previous design. Because 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 foundation created tricky structural challenges, especially on lower floors where the new tower’s weight had to transfer to preexisting supports.
Days after meeting Murdoch, Ingels faced a reality check from his project manager, Ute Rinnebach, who returned from a meeting with engineers to report that retrofitting the foundation by shoring up underground walls in the Port Authority’s domain was forbidden. Altering that reinforcement risked destabilizing the entire structural scheme. Simultaneously, a facade consultant delivered more bad news: New York Police Department security standards required all facades at the World Trade Center to be made of heavier laminated safety glass to withstand potential explosions, eliminating Ingels’s plan to use thinner, cheaper materials in certain areas to cut costs.
With Silverstein and Murdoch navigating a tense bargaining juncture, any departure from standard formulas carried a steep construction-cost premium. For a few weeks, the fate of the project remained in doubt as Ingels worked to resolve the issues without ruining the design. Ultimately, he accepted painful structural modifications.
"I think it still sort of looks like itself," he noted hopefully.
By early June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch fell into place, allowing the parties to publicly unveil the design for Two World Trade Center. Before the public reveal, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the architect behind the original master plan for the World Trade Center complex.
Gathered in BIG’s conference room, the architects reviewed a glowing plastic replica of the tower. Ingels pointed out how the design respected Libeskind’s "Wedge of Light" plaza and solved foundation alignment challenges through a series of diagonal columns. Libeskind offered an approving slap on the table and declared it a "super building."
Initial reviews following the June 9 unveiling were largely positive, though Libeskind noted that the true challenge of architecture lay ahead. Elements of the tower’s design continued to shift, including a temporary loss and subsequent return of one of its stacked boxes, accompanied by a 90-foot reduction in overall height. The tower also faced an unexpected critic in Douglas Durst, operator of the neighboring One World Trade Center, who publicly voiced disappointment with the orientation of the stepped gardens.
Despite such hurdles, Ingels continued to expand his firm’s footprint. Alongside his work in New York—which included multiple skyline additions and the $335 million Dryline flood defense system—he took on a master plan for the Smithsonian’s South Mall campus in Washington, DC.
Reflecting on his rapid ascent, Preston Scott Cohen, an acclaimed architect and Harvard professor, observed that Ingels had bypassed the traditional avant-garde trajectory with unprecedented speed and success. Yet Ingels remained focused on the pragmatism required to execute ambitious projects.
"A lot of the starchitects have started their careers doing some high-end sculptural projects," Ingels said. "When they suddenly get faced with something that is more governed by the parameters of the practical, they end up almost petrified or paralyzed, because their usual repertoire doesn’t work."
By late summer, BIG established new offices on Broadway near Wall Street, housing a growing team of international architects with a clear view northward toward the World Trade Center. While negotiations, engineering hurdles, and cost adjustments continued to shape Two World Trade Center, Ingels embraced the complex realities of his profession.
"Solving a gigantic equation with multiple variables," Ingels described it, "where a lot of the variables claim to be fixed. You must find out which of the ones are actually variable."
