On a misty April morning, Bjarke Ingels stood atop the roof of an old brick building high above a cobblestoned street in Lower Manhattan, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped. The Danish architect was shooting a promotional film about the most significant 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—media magnate Rupert Murdoch—had yet to formally sign off. Yet the hyper-eloquent 40-year-old 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 this moment, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his companies remained one of New York real estate’s biggest secrets, but Ingels could not wait to share the news.
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 mark the final structure envisioned in the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center. The ensemble surrounds two cascading pools that pay tribute to the roughly 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. However, Ingels emphasized that the memorial is about remembering the tragedy, while the tower should focus on 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 the 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 designed a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen with a slanted roof that serves as a recreational ski slope and a smokestack programmed 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 Thomas Heatherwick—envisioned a wildly elaborate complex of geodesic domes featuring 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 architecture standards. 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. Ingels’ largest project to date at the time, a striking pyramidal apartment building under construction along Manhattan’s West Side Highway at 57th Street known as VIA 57 West, was about 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 single skyscraper. With Two World Trade Center, he believed he had discovered a way to create a new kind of high-rise work environment—one that transforms a form that is fundamentally vertical and hierarchical into a place for horizontal interaction. The laborious part, however, was proving he could transform that captivating story 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: Rupert Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the developer who has controlled much of the World Trade Center rebuilding. Murdoch and Silverstein still needed to agree on a long-term lease to allow the $4 billion skyscraper to be financed.
"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 came to 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 irrational government, embodied by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the lumbering transportation agency that owns the underlying land.
For 14 years, these factors conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, upending many architectural ambitions. In fact, Ingels’ design had displaced an earlier one by Lord Norman Foster. To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had to balance the sometimes conflicting demands of Murdoch and Silverstein while juggling other major clients who had recently retained his firm.
The first force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center was inertia. Silverstein thought he had a perfectly good design from Foster and harbored serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings, fearing the stacked structure would look asymmetrical or teetering from certain perspectives. Silverstein almost rejected the entire deal until an endorsement from the architects of other World Trade Center buildings changed his mind.
The following Monday, the principals gathered in a conference room overlooking the site. Unflappable under normal circumstances, Ingels found himself knocked off balance by Murdoch’s rapid-fire questioning. Murdoch’s deepest concern was structural: why didn’t the building fall over? With assistance from 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 inner core—which houses crucial elevators—in an off-center position. This layout produced expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, views of the plaza from Fox News studios, and outdoor terraces. Murdoch was ultimately sold on the concept.
In his efforts, Ingels counted on a powerful ally: James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. As the moving force behind the decision to relocate 21st Century Fox and News Corp. from an aging building near Rockefeller Center, the younger Murdoch sought an open, loftlike, creative workplace. After exploring various sites, he arrived at the World Trade Center and selected Ingels, noting the architect’s unique talent for problem-solving within strict constraints.
However, a major constraint involved the remnants of Foster’s design. As 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 problems, especially in the lobby and lower floors, which needed to be engineered to shift the tower’s weight onto preexisting supports.
Ten days after his meeting with Murdoch, Ingels faced a new setback. His project manager, Ute Rinnebach, returned from meeting with engineers bearing bad news: the idea to retrofit the foundation by shoring up walls and columns within the Port Authority’s domain was forbidden. Removing that crucial reinforcement risked destabilizing the entire structural scheme. Furthermore, a facade consultant informed him that New York Police Department security standards required all facades at the World Trade Center to be laminated safety glass, increasing the weight and defying his plans for cost-saving thinner materials.
For weeks, the fate of the project remained in doubt as Silverstein and Murdoch navigated tense lease negotiations. Yet, after agreeing to several painful structural changes, Ingels managed to salvage the core design.
As the project progressed, Ingels continued to rack up commissions across Manhattan, including four major additions to the Hudson River skyline, a master plan for the Smithsonian’s South Mall campus in Washington, DC, and the Dryline, a $335 million hybrid park and flood defense system. His rapid rise has confounded expectations in an industry where careers typically build slowly.
"He has just bypassed all the rest of the avant-garde," said Preston Scott Cohen, an acclaimed architect and professor at the Harvard School of Design. "No one has done it that fast, with that degree of success."
By early June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch fell into place, prompting the public unveiling of the Two World Trade Center design. Before the reveal, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the architect who created the master plan for the World Trade Center complex. During a presentation in BIG’s conference room, Ingels demonstrated how his design respected Libeskind’s master plan, including the Wedge of Light plaza. Libeskind gave his approval with a slap on the table, congratulating him on a "super building."
Despite the successful unveiling, the path from model to reality remained fraught with economic, social, and political hurdles. Throughout the design process, the building’s height fluctuated, and the tower even acquired a critic in Douglas Durst, operator of the adjacent One World Trade Center, who expressed disappointment with the orientation of its stepped gardens.
Nevertheless, Ingels remained philosophical about the pragmatic boundaries of architecture, viewing challenges not as roadblocks, but as variables in a gigantic equation waiting to be solved. With new office spaces established on Broadway and an expanding portfolio of epic projects underway, Bjarke Ingels continues to reshape the landscape of modern architecture, turning fictional concepts into undeniable reality.
