On a misty April day in Lower Manhattan, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels stood high above a cobblestoned street on the roof of an old brick building, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped. The 40-year-old 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 Ingels did not 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 best-kept secrets, but Ingels was eager to broadcast the news from the rooftops.
Between takes, Ingels pointed toward 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 is slated to be among the tallest buildings in New York City, and the final structure envisioned in the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center site. 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. Ingels, however, was focused on making 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 designed a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen featuring a slanted roof that doubles 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, alongside collaborator Thomas Heatherwick, crafted an elaborate complex of geodesic domes, envisioning 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 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 his firm had not yet completed a single skyscraper. With Two World Trade Center, Ingels believed he had found a way to create a new kind of high-rise work environment—one that turns a form fundamentally vertical and hierarchical into a space for horizontal interaction. The laborious part 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 continuously had to prove its value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the developer who has controlled much of the World Trade Center rebuilding. Murdoch and Silverstein still had 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 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 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 that owns the land beneath the Trade Center.
For 14 years, these factors conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, leveling many architectural ambitions. Ingels’ design actually displaced an earlier proposal by Lord Norman Foster—though 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 needed to balance the conflicting demands of Murdoch and Silverstein, who planned to market the top half of the building as office space, while juggling other major clients who had recently retained his firm.
The first force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center was institutional inertia. Silverstein felt he already had a sound design from Foster and harbored serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings, fearing the stacked structure would appear asymmetrical or teetering from certain angles. Silverstein almost rejected the deal entirely until receiving endorsements from the architects of other World Trade Center buildings.
The following Monday, the principals gathered in a conference room overlooking the site. Unflappable under normal circumstances, Ingels found himself temporarily off balance due to Murdoch’s rapid-fire questioning. 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 resulted from placing the inner core—which houses the elevators—off-center, creating expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, views of the plaza from Fox News studios, and outdoor terraces. Murdoch was ultimately convinced.
"Before you get that story, most people suspect that it’s all just follies," Ingels reflected. "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, seeking an open, loftlike, creative workplace. After exploring potential sites, James settled on the World Trade Center and chose Ingels because he understood those spatial desires.
The primary constraint involved the remnants of Foster’s 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 new skyscraper onto that existing foundation created tricky structural problems, particularly in the lobby and lower floors, which had to be engineered to shift the tower’s weight onto preexisting supports.
Ten days after his meeting with Murdoch, Ingels was working in his firm’s offices when his project manager, Ute Rinnebach, returned from a meeting with the structural engineers bearing bad news. Ingels’ idea for retrofitting the foundation by shoring up underground walls and columns in the Port Authority’s domain was forbidden; removing that reinforcement could cause the structural scheme to collapse. Furthermore, a facade consultant delivered another setback: 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 on parts of the building to offset costs.
As Silverstein and Murdoch navigated tense lease negotiations, any departure from standard formulas carried a heavy financial premium. "Right now," Ingels noted, "the architecture is essentially held hostage."
For weeks, the project’s fate remained in doubt. Ingels ultimately averted disaster by agreeing to a series of painful structural changes, though he maintained that the design retained its core identity. Walking through the World Trade Center plaza with Silverstein executives, Janno Lieber, Silverstein’s second-in-command, praised the turnaround.
"I gotta tell you, I gotta give you a hug," Lieber said. "That was a helluva turnaround that you guys did in the last week."
As BIG expanded globally, Ingels took on the role of brand ambassador, delegating authority to 11 partners and a talented staff of junior architects. Yet the firm remained a highly personalized operation. Whether dealing with concrete samples for a residential facade, residential clients in Palo Alto, or waterfront pavilions in Brooklyn, Ingels maintained a hands-on approach to problem-solving.
By early June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch was in place, and the parties publicly unveiled the design for Two World Trade Center. Before the unveiling, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the architect who created the overall master plan for the site. Gathered in BIG’s conference room with a glowing plastic replica of the tower, Ingels demonstrated how the design respected Libeskind’s Wedge of Light plaza and solved the foundation alignment challenge using 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 Libeskind noted that the true challenge of architecture lay ahead between the first public smile and the final stone, navigating economics, politics, and power brokers. Even as initial hurdles cleared, the tower faced minor design fluctuations and a critique from developer Douglas Durst, who operated One World Trade Center next door and objected to the orientation of the stepped gardens.
Despite such friction, Ingels remained content to work within pragmatic boundaries, viewing architectural obstacles not as roadblocks, but as variables in a massive design equation. Standing near the World Trade Center site, framing a mental picture with his hands, Ingels looked ahead to the construction of his latest monumental tower.
"Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit," he said. "I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
