On a misty April morning in Lower Manhattan, Bjarke Ingels stands near the edge of an old brick building’s roof, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped against the crisp air. The Danish architect is filming a promotional segment for the most monumental and challenging commission of his career: a design for the skyscraper known as Two World Trade Center.
At this moment, the project remains a work in progress, and his primary client—media titan Rupert Murdoch—has yet to formally sign off. Yet the hyper-eloquent 40-year-old architect is not about to let doubt interfere with his vision. He has obsessively calibrated every line and image, telling his director that he wants viewers to experience a visceral sense of awe.
While Murdoch’s plan to relocate his corporate empire is still one of New York real estate’s most tightly guarded secrets, Ingels can barely contain his excitement. Between takes, he points out a void in the densely packed Manhattan skyline, tracing the profile of a skyscraper that, for now, exists only in his mind and blueprints. From this vantage point, Ingels’ design resembles a stack of seven asymmetrical blocks, ascending like a grand 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 remarks, echoing the nation’s traditional motto. "Out of many, one."
If completed, the tower will stand among the tallest buildings in New York City and serve as the final piece in the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center. The resulting ensemble will encircle two cascading memorial pools that honor the roughly 3,000 victims of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. But Ingels is not preoccupied with designing a monument to the past. He wants to make his own history.
"The memorial is about the memorial," Ingels explains. "The tower should be about the living city."
Eclecticism on Demand
Ingels is fond of describing architecture as "the art of turning fiction into fact." He possesses a rare combination of talents—he is an adept draftsman, a persuasive salesman, and a charismatic cultivator of his own professional brand. Yet his greatest asset is a remarkable gift for storytelling: an innate ability to construct a compelling narrative around the most stubborn practical necessities.
Often, his designs careen in wildly fantastical directions. He is currently overseeing the construction of 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—collaborating with British designer Thomas Heatherwick—envisioned an elaborate complex of geodesic domes, imagining a lifestyle centered on biking, hiking, and coding beneath a sunlit glass terrarium.
Such imaginative flights have made Ingels an international sensation, earning him high-profile commissions at an age considered remarkably precocious by architectural standards. However, fame in this profession can be a deceptive metric. As Ingels well knows, an architect’s built work is like the light of a distant star, reaching the public eye only after a long, arduous journey of years.
His largest completed project to date—a striking pyramidal apartment building rising along Manhattan’s West Side Highway at 57th Street—is roughly one-third the scale of Two World Trade Center. "At the moment we are working seriously on one of the most daunting buildings in downtown New York," Ingels acknowledges. "We still haven’t completed a skyscraper."
With Two World Trade Center, Ingels believes he has devised a way to reinvent the high-rise workplace, transforming a structural typology that is inherently vertical and hierarchical into a canvas for horizontal collaboration. Now comes the exhausting, laborious phase: proving he can translate that captivating narrative into physical reality.
To realize his design, Ingels must constantly validate its value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Rupert Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the veteran developer who has overseen the bulk of the World Trade Center rebuilding effort. Before the $4-billion skyscraper can secure financing, Murdoch and Silverstein must finalize a long-term lease.
"There’s a lot of drama with the deal right now," Ingels admits on the day of his film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be."
Even if the principals reach an agreement, numerous other hazards lie ahead, including a volatile real estate market, the unavoidable political melodrama of building on a site of mass casualty, and the bureaucratic friction of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency that owns the underlying land.
For 14 years, these compounding factors have kept the Trade Center redevelopment lurching unpredictably forward, crushing many an ambitious architectural vision. In fact, Ingels’ design directly displaced an earlier concept by British architect Lord Norman Foster. (Turnabout is fair play: Foster had previously pushed aside Ingels during a competition for a national library in Kazakhstan.)
To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels must carefully balance the competing demands of Murdoch and Silverstein, who intend to market the upper half of the building as premium office space. At the same time, he must juggle a wave of new clients who have recently rushed to hire his firm, playfully named BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group). Ingels’ meteoric rise has inspired a mixture of awe and professional envy among his peers. Yet in architecture, a single triumphant building can make a reputation, just as one catastrophic failure can ruin it.
Undaunted, Ingels embraces the mounting pressure, framing it through a philosophical lens. "It is like this Zen exercise," he says. "Turning the force of your enemy into your own strength."
Navigating the Obstacles
The initial resistance Ingels encountered at the World Trade Center was institutional inertia. Silverstein was entirely satisfied with Foster’s existing design and held profound reservations regarding Ingels’ early sketches. He worried that the stacked, asymmetrical structure would appear precarious from certain viewing angles.
"He just thought, like, could he see it fit in? No," Ingels recalls. "Was it a nice design for another place? Maybe, but not here."
Silverstein nearly walked away from the deal altogether before an endorsement from the architects behind other World Trade Center buildings swayed his perspective. Even so, on the day of the rooftop shoot, Ingels received word that Rupert Murdoch wished to personally review the latest iterations of the design.
The following Monday, the project principals gathered in a conference room overlooking the site. Known for his unflappable demeanor, Ingels found himself briefly thrown off balance by the combative Australian media mogul’s rapid-fire interrogation.
"It’s almost sort of like kangaroo boxing," Ingels notes.
According to multiple sources, Murdoch’s primary concern was deceptively simple: Why doesn’t it fall over? With assistance from David Childs, the courtly architect behind One World Trade Center, Ingels explained that the leaning silhouette was a visual illusion. The unorthodox stepped geometry resulted from shifting the building’s inner core—which houses essential elevator shafts—off-center, thereby creating expansive interior floor plates for newsrooms, sweeping views of the Trade Center plaza for Fox News studios, and sprawling outdoor terraces.
Murdoch was convinced. "Before you get that story, most people suspect that it’s all just follies," Ingels says. "The more blatantly the architect can explain why things are the way they are, the better."
Ingels also found a powerful ally in James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. It was the younger Murdoch who spearheaded the search for a new headquarters to relocate 21st Century Fox and News Corp. away from their aging offices near Rockefeller Center.
"It was funny," James Murdoch recalls. "We sort of thought, ‘Let’s not hire a starchitect, let’s not build a big tower.’"
Instead, he envisioned an open, loft-like, creative workspace. Yet after extensively surveying potential sites across the city, the search ultimately led back to the World Trade Center—and to Ingels, a star architect who uniquely grasped his corporate ethos.
"We were struck by what a great problem solver he was," James says. "This is someone who can take a set of constraints and create something surprising and effective out of them."
The Reality of Constraints
The foremost engineering constraint involved Foster’s legacy—specifically, the subterranean foundations already constructed as part of a $4-billion underground transportation hub built under a political compromise between Silverstein and the Port Authority. While the rest of the tower was designed to rise once an anchor tenant was secured, James Murdoch felt Foster’s conservative high-rise did not suit a modern media enterprise. Ingels dismissed the design even more bluntly, calling it "a generic extrusion with a flashy hat."
However, grafting a novel skyscraper onto Foster’s preexisting foundation introduced immense structural hurdles, particularly in the lobby and lower floors, which had to transfer the new tower’s immense weight onto older support columns. What Ingels envisioned in the sky had to connect seamlessly with what was already anchored deep in the earth.
Ten days after meeting with Murdoch, Ingels returns to BIG’s offices just as staff members are packing up ahead of an office relocation. Brandishing a marker, he approaches a whiteboard to explain the mechanics of his design.
"A lot of towers, as they get over a certain height, they tend toward a square footprint," Ingels explains, noting that generic forms are traditionally dictated by economics and structural wind loads. "We just redistributed the calories."
Before he can finish, Ute Rinnebach, his project manager for Two World Trade Center, bursts into the room straight from a meeting with the structural engineers.
"How did it go?" Ingels asks.
"Really bad," Rinnebach replies. "I’ve got some horrible news for you."
Ingels’ plan to retrofit the foundation involved reinforcing underground walls and columns within the Port Authority’s jurisdiction—an option that was strictly prohibited. Removing crucial structural reinforcement, much like pulling a block from a Jenga tower, threatened to destabilize the entire engineering scheme.
Worse still, a facade consultant soon delivered another financial blow. Ingels had planned to vary the alignment of the glass panes and metal mullions to reduce costs. However, New York Police Department security guidelines mandate that all exterior glazing at the World Trade Center consist of heavy laminated safety glass to resist potential explosive impacts.
"I was like, fuck!" Ingels admits. "Because that’s a piece of information that hadn’t reached me. I just thought I had an ace up my sleeve, which I didn’t, because the building has to be safe from explosions."
As negotiations between Silverstein and Murdoch reached a tense impasse, any departure from standard architectural formulas began driving up cost estimates. "Right now," Ingels notes, "the architecture is essentially held hostage."
For several weeks, the project’s fate hung in the balance. But after accepting a series of difficult structural compromises, Ingels managed to salvage the core vision. Walking across the World Trade Center plaza one afternoon, he encounters Janno Lieber, Silverstein’s formidable second-in-command, who praises the team’s rapid adjustments.
"I gotta tell you, I gotta give you a hug," Lieber says. "That was a helluva turnaround that you guys did in the last week."
For Ingels, the episode reinforces his philosophy on design and evolution. "In Darwinian evolution, the animal has two primary instincts, right? Fight or flight," he reflects. "And normally you would associate innovation with plowing through and fighting for your standpoint. But often in evolution it is the moment of flight where you are forced to go another route… In architecture, sometimes the eureka moment is actually when you give up a stance and say, OK, we have to try something else."
The Scale of Ambition
That evolutionary metaphor speaks to a fundamental reality of the profession: architects must learn to live with continuous compromise. In his 2009 manifesto, Yes Is More, Ingels observed that "most architectural projects either miscarry or die in early infancy," estimating that of 200 designs produced in his firm’s first eight years, only 11 were built.
Fame has dramatically shifted those odds by pairing BIG with exceptionally well-resourced clients. Google encouraged Ingels to indulge his wildest conceptual impulses—at one point, CEO Larry Page reportedly brushed aside a parking dilemma by telling him, "It’s nothing that $50 million won’t solve." Even so, local zoning boards in Mountain View ultimately denied the development rights required to build the entire 2.5 million-square-foot campus, proving that even tech behemoths face administrative roadblocks.
Yet work continues to flow into BIG’s offices at an astonishing pace. In Manhattan alone, Ingels is concurrently designing four major additions to the Hudson River skyline alongside the Dryline—a $335-million hybrid park and flood-defense system intended to protect Lower Manhattan from future climate disasters. In Washington, DC, his team is drafting a master plan for the Smithsonian’s South Mall campus.
Having founded BIG in Copenhagen just a decade ago, Ingels has charted a trajectory that has thoroughly confounded industry expectations. "He has just bypassed all the rest of the avant-garde," says Preston Scott Cohen, an acclaimed architect and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. "No one has done it that fast, with that degree of success. You name them, he has just flown right over their heads."
Traditionally, museum-grade architecture has been restricted to civic institutions, while profit-driven commercial real estate remained the domain of utilitarian corporate firms. Ingels insists that BIG operates as "both pragmatic and utopian," seeing no reason why artistic ambition cannot elevate office complexes and megaprojects.
"It’s a genre shift, because he’s almost a corporate architect at this point," Cohen observes. "But I don’t think those are his ambitions. He did not grow up in that culture."
As a protégé of Rem Koolhaas—one of contemporary architecture’s most influential theorists—Ingels absorbed a fearless attitude toward putting ideas on the table. But while Koolhaas famously outlined his theories in his provocative treatise Delirious New York without ever constructing a major building in the city, his former student is aggressively leaving a tangible mark on the urban fabric.
"Why is it that imaginative architects that do surprising and beautiful and thought-provoking stuff can’t do the really big buildings that matter?" Ingels asks.
By rejecting the rigid dogmas of early modernism—which he blames for turning office buildings into "boring boxes"—Ingels embraces what he playfully calls "BIGamy": the refusal to adhere to a single aesthetic style, allowing him to flexibly respond to diverse client demands. Whether designing a "courtscraper" on West 57th Street or negotiating the complex geometries of Two World Trade Center, Ingels treats architecture as an exercise in creative problem-solving.
As BIG’s new offices on Broadway fill with young international designers, Ingels pauses to take in the sweeping view north toward the World Trade Center site.
"So," he says with a grin, "pretty epic."
By early June, a tentative lease agreement between Silverstein and Murdoch was finally secured, allowing the partners to publicly unveil the design for Two World Trade Center. Before the public rollout, however, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the master planner for the World Trade Center site—and a cautionary figure who experienced firsthand the unforgiving realities of New York real estate development.
Gathered in BIG’s conference room, the architects examined an illuminated scale model of the tower. Ingels carefully demonstrated how his design respected Libeskind’s original vision, including the pedestrian corridor known as the Wedge of Light, and explained how his diagonal lobby columns resolved the structural alignment with Foster’s existing foundations.
"We get an almost Libeskind-esque language," Ingels noted, "defined simply by connecting the dots."
Libeskind offered his verdict with a decisive slap on the table. "Congratulations, that is a super building," he said, before turning to Janno Lieber with a touch of mischief. "I hope we’re going to see it going up, Mr. Janno."
Yet, as Libeskind noted, navigating initial public enthusiasm is only the beginning. "Between that first smile and the last stone is the challenge of architecture… this complex space filled with what the city really is: economics, society, power brokers, politicians."
As negotiations continued, the tower’s height fluctuated slightly, and external critics emerged—including Douglas Durst, operator of the adjacent One World Trade Center, who voiced sharp disapproval of the building’s orientation and stepped gardens. Such friction highlights the inherent risks of high-stakes commercial architecture, where every client demands undivided attention and pleasing everyone remains an impossible equation.
Yet back at the drawing board, surrounded by structural diagrams and cost estimates, Ingels remains characteristically unfazed. Whether he is pitching a waterfront pavilion or untangling the logistical realities of building a skyscraper in downtown Manhattan, his approach remains grounded in a relentless optimism.
"A lot of the starchitects have started their careers doing some high-end sculptural projects," Ingels reflects over breakfast in Tribeca. "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."
For Ingels, the ultimate goal is not to escape practical limitations, but to master them. Walking back toward the Trade Center plaza in the morning sunlight, he frames a mental image with his hands and clicks his tongue like a camera shutter.
"Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit," he says. "I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
