On a misty April day in Lower Manhattan, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels stood on the roof of an old brick building, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped, shooting a promotional film for the most important commission of his young career. At just 40 years old, the hyper-eloquent architect was working on a design for the skyscraper known as Two World Trade Center, even as his primary client—media magnate Rupert Murdoch—had yet to formally sign off.
At the time, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his companies from an aging building near Rockefeller Center was still one of New York real estate’s biggest secrets. 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 his perspective, the 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 mark the final piece of the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center site. The complex rings two cascading pools that pay tribute to the roughly 3,000 people who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. While the memorial honors the past, Ingels focused firmly on the future. "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." Possessing talents as a draftsman, a salesman, and a charismatic cultivator of his own image, his greatest asset remains a gift for storytelling—the ability to construct a compelling narrative around pragmatic necessities. His designs frequently veer in fantastical directions. In Copenhagen, he designed a waste-to-energy plant with a slanted roof that doubles as a recreational ski slope, featuring a smokestack engineered to puff a symbolic ring of steam every time a ton of carbon dioxide is emitted. For a proposed expansion of Google’s campus in Mountain View, California, Ingels collaborated with designer Thomas Heatherwick on an elaborate complex of geodesic domes, envisioning a lifestyle of biking, hiking, and coding beneath a sunlit glass terrarium.
Such imaginative flights made Ingels famous—and highly sought-after—at an age considered precocious by the standards of traditional architecture. Yet fame can be a deceptive indicator in a profession where an architect’s work travels a years-long journey before ever reaching the public eye. Ingels’ largest project to date at the time, a striking pyramidal apartment building under construction along Manhattan’s West Side Highway 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 yet to complete a single skyscraper. With Two World Trade Center, he believed he had discovered a way to reinvent the high-rise work environment, transforming a vertically oriented, hierarchical form into a space for horizontal interaction. The laborious part, however, lay in proving he could translate that captivating narrative into hard facts on the ground.
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 specific client demands, all in service of creating designs unlike anything seen before.
To realize his design for Two World Trade Center, 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 still needed to agree on a long-term lease that would allow the $4 billion skyscraper to be financed.
"There’s a lot of drama with the deal right now," Ingels said during his film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be."
Even with an agreement, the project faced a volatile real estate market, the political melodrama inherent in building on a site of mass tragedy, and the bureaucratic hurdles of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency owning the land beneath the complex. For 14 years, these factors had kept the redevelopment process lurching unpredictably, dashing many architectural ambitions.
Ingels’ design had actually 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 upper half of the building as office space, while juggling the demands of a rapidly expanding global firm.
The first major force Ingels had to overcome was sheer inertia. Silverstein was initially content with Foster’s design and expressed serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings, fearing the stacked structure would look asymmetrical or teetering from certain angles. Silverstein nearly rejected the entire proposal until receiving endorsements from the architects of other World Trade Center buildings.
Shortly after, Ingels faced a rigorous grilling from Rupert Murdoch himself during a conference room meeting overlooking the site. Murdoch’s primary concern was structural stability: why didn’t the building fall over? With assistance from architect David Childs, Ingels explained that the leaning effect was an optical illusion. The unorthodox stepped form resulted from placing the inner core—which houses vital elevators—in an off-center position, creating expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, outdoor terraces, and views of the plaza for Fox News studios. The explanation won Murdoch over.
Ingels also found a powerful ally in James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. As the driving force behind the relocation of 21st Century Fox and News Corp. from Rockefeller Center, James initially thought about avoiding a traditional "starchitect" or large tower. Instead, he wanted an open, loftlike, creative workplace. After exploring various sites, he arrived at the World Trade Center and connected with Ingels, praising his ability to solve problems effectively within strict constraints.
Structural Challenges and Engineering Realities
The foremost constraint involved the remnants of Foster’s original 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 completely new skyscraper onto an existing foundation created complex engineering hurdles, especially in the lobby and lower floors, where the new tower’s weight had to transfer onto preexisting supports.
Ten days after meeting with Murdoch, Ingels and his project manager, Ute Rinnebach, learned from engineers that modifying underground walls and columns within the Port Authority’s domain was prohibited. Removing vital reinforcements risked destabilizing the entire structural scheme.
Simultaneously, a facade consultant delivered more discouraging news. Ingels had planned to use thinner glass panels in certain areas to offset a $60 million cost increase over Foster’s design. However, New York Police Department security standards mandated that all facades at the World Trade Center use heavy, laminated safety glass to protect against potential explosions.
As negotiations between Silverstein and Murdoch grew tense, any departure from standard architectural formulas incurred massive cost penalties. For weeks, the fate of the project remained in doubt as Ingels worked to revise the structural plans without compromising the core design.
By early June, a tentative agreement between Silverstein and Murdoch fell into place, giving the parties confidence to publicly unveil the design for Two World Trade Center on June 9. Before the public launch, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the architect who created the master plan for the revitalized World Trade Center complex.
During a presentation at BIG’s offices, Ingels walked Libeskind and Silverstein executives through a glowing model of the tower, highlighting how the design respected Libeskind’s original master plan, including the pedestrian plaza known as the Wedge of Light. Ingels explained how an array of diagonal columns in the lobby solved the challenge of aligning structural supports with Foster’s prebuilt foundation.
Libeskind offered a resounding endorsement, striking the table and declaring, "Congratulations, that is a super building."
Initial public reviews of Two World Trade Center were largely positive, though the complex realities of urban development remained. Over subsequent months, the tower experienced height adjustments and minor redesigns, while facing unexpected criticism from Douglas Durst, the developer of neighboring One World Trade Center, who expressed dissatisfaction with the orientation of the stepped gardens.
Despite the hurdles, BIG continued to expand its footprint in New York City and globally. Alongside the World Trade Center commission, Ingels’ firm worked on multiple major additions to the Manhattan skyline, a $335 million hybrid park and flood defense system known as the Dryline along the East River, and a master plan for the Smithsonian Institution’s South Mall campus in Washington, DC.
Reflecting on his rapid rise and the pragmatic boundaries of modern architecture, Ingels remained philosophical about the compromises required to bring ambitious designs into reality.
"In architecture, sometimes the eureka moment is actually when you give up a stance and say, OK, we have to try something else," Ingels said. "A lot of the starchitects have started their careers doing some high-end sculptural projects. 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."
