On a misty April morning, Bjarke Ingels stood on 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 for 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—media magnate Rupert Murdoch—had yet to formally sign off.
Yet the hyper-eloquent, then-40-year-old architect refused to let doubt stand in the way of his vision. Having obsessed over every line and image, he told his director that he wanted viewers to swoon. At that moment, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his companies was still one of New York real estate’s biggest guarded secrets, but Ingels was ready to shout the news, quite literally, 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 mark the final piece of the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center. The architectural ensemble rings two cascading pools paying tribute to the roughly 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But Ingels was not preoccupied with replicating the somber tone of the memorial; 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. At the time, he was building 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 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—created an elaborate complex of geodesic domes, envisioning a lifestyle of biking, hiking, and coding inside a sunlit glass terrarium.
Such imaginative flights made Ingels famous, and highly sought-after, at an age considered precocious by architecture standards. But 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 completed project to date at the time—a striking pyramidal apartment building under construction along Manhattan’s West Side Highway at 57th Street—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 still hadn’t completed a traditional skyscraper. With Two World Trade Center, however, he believed he had imagined a way to create a new kind of high-rise work environment, turning a form fundamentally vertical and hierarchical into a space for horizontal interaction. The laborious part would be 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 continuously had to 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 had 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, hazards remained: a volatile real estate market, the political melodrama inherent in building on a site of mass murder, and an often irrational government bureaucracy, embodied by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency owning the land beneath the Trade Center buildings. For 14 years, these factors conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching unpredictably, leveling many architectural ambitions. Ingels’ design had even displaced an earlier one by Lord Norman Foster. (Turnabout was fair play, as Foster had previously pushed aside Ingels on a national library project in Kazakhstan.) To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had to balance the conflicting demands of Murdoch and Silverstein, while juggling other major clients who had recently showered business on BIG.
The first force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center was institutional inertia. Silverstein believed 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 endorsements 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 by nature, Ingels was briefly knocked off balance by the combative Australian media magnate’s rapid-fire questioning.
"It’s almost sort of like kangaroo boxing," Ingels remarked hours later back at his office. Murdoch’s primary 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 an optical illusion. The unorthodox stepped form of the building resulted from placing the inner core—which houses crucial elevators—in an off-center position, creating expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, views of the plaza from Fox News studios, and outdoor terraces. Murdoch was sold.
"Before you get that story, most people suspect that it’s all just follies," Ingels explained. "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 his father’s companies, 21st Century Fox and News Corp., from an aging building near Rockefeller Center.
"It was funny," James said. "We sort of thought, ‘Let’s not hire a starchitect, let’s not build a big tower.’" He initially wanted an open, loftlike, creative workplace. But after exploring potential sites, he ended up at the World Trade Center with Ingels—a star who understood his desires. "We were struck by what a great problem solver he was," James noted. "This is someone who can take a set of constraints and create something surprising and effective out of them."
The foremost constraint involved Foster’s legacy. As the result 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 Foster’s foundation created tricky structural problems, especially in the lobby and lower floors, which had to shift the tower’s weight onto preexisting supports.
Ten days after his meeting with Murdoch, Ingels was working in his office as project manager Ute Rinnebach returned from meeting with structural engineers bearing bad news. Ingels’ idea for retrofitting the foundation involved shoring up walls and columns within the Port Authority’s domain, which proved impermissible. Removing that crucial reinforcement could cause the structural scheme to fail. Furthermore, a facade consultant delivered another blow: New York Police Department security standards required all facades at the World Trade Center to be laminated safety glass, increasing the weight and eliminating Ingels’ plan to use thinner, cheaper glass products on parts of the building.
With Silverstein and Murdoch navigating a tense bargaining juncture, any departure from standard formulas carried a heavy construction-cost premium. For a few weeks, the project’s fate hung in the balance. But after agreeing to several painful structural changes, Ingels managed to salvage the core design.
By early June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch fell into place, and the design for Two World Trade Center was publicly unveiled. Before the reveal, however, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, who laid out the master plan for the new World Trade Center complex. One morning, Silverstein executives joined Ingels and Libeskind for a presentation in BIG’s conference room, where a glowing plastic replica of Two World Trade Center sat on the table. Ingels took care to show how the building respected Libeskind’s Wedge of Light plaza and solved foundation alignment challenges through diagonal columns.
Libeskind delivered his verdict with a slap on the table: "Congratulations, that is a super building."
Initial reviews of the design were largely positive, though the path from model to reality remained fraught. The tower’s height eventually shrank by 90 feet through various design iterations, and the project even acquired an unexpected critic in Douglas Durst, operator of the neighboring One World Trade Center, who voiced displeasure over the orientation of the stepped gardens.
Yet, as BIG continued to expand with high-profile projects—including a master plan for the Smithsonian’s South Mall campus in Washington, D.C., and a $335 million hybrid park and flood defense system known as the Dryline in Manhattan—Ingels remained steadfast in his pragmatic approach.
Reflecting on the challenges of navigating the complex web of economics, power brokers, and politicians that define major urban development, Ingels embraced the evolutionary metaphor of adaptation. In architecture, he suggested, the eureka moment often arrives not when you stubbornly fight for a single stance, but when you are forced to explore new territory.
"In architecture," Ingels said, "sometimes the eureka moment is actually when you give up a stance and say, OK, we have to try something else."
