On a misty April morning, Bjarke Ingels stood on the roof of a historic brick building high above the cobblestoned streets of Lower Manhattan, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped. The Danish architect was shooting a promotional film for the defining commission of his young career: his revolutionary design for the skyscraper known as Two World Trade Center.
At the time, the project remained 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 refused to let doubt hinder 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 corporate empire stood as one of New York real estate’s most closely guarded secrets. But Ingels could hardly wait to shout the news, quite literally, from the rooftops.
Between takes, Ingels pointed toward a void in the densely packed Manhattan skyline, tracing the profile of a skyscraper visible only in his mind’s eye. From this perspective, his design resembled a stack of seven distinct blocks, ascending like a monumental 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 rank among the tallest buildings in New York City and stand as the final structure envisioned in the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center site. The ensemble was designed to ring two cascading pools paying tribute to the roughly 3,000 victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Ingels, however, was not preoccupied with the tragedy itself; he wanted to forge his own history. "The memorial is about the memorial," he noted. "The tower should be about the living city."
Ingels frequently describes architecture as "the art of turning fiction into fact." He possesses manifold talents—as a draftsman, a salesman, and a charming cultivator of his own winning public image—but his greatest asset is a remarkable gift for storytelling: an innate ability to construct a compelling narrative around practical necessities. Often, his designs veer in fantastical directions.
For instance, he oversaw 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 engineered to puff a symbolic ring of steam each time it emits a ton of carbon dioxide. For a proposed expansion of Google’s corporate campus in Mountain View, California, Ingels—collaborating with designer Thomas Heatherwick—envisioned a wildly elaborate complex of geodesic domes, imagining 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 remarkably precocious within standard architectural circles. Yet fame can serve as a deceptive indicator in his profession, where an architect’s built work, much like the light of a distant star, often reaches the public eye only after a grueling, years-long journey.
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 evolving client demands—all in service of creating designs unlike anything seen before.
To realize his Two World Trade Center design, however, Ingels had to continually prove its value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the veteran developer who has overseen much of the World Trade Center rebuilding effort. Murdoch and Silverstein still needed to finalize a long-term lease to make the financing of the $4 billion skyscraper viable.
"There’s a lot of drama with the deal right now," Ingels remarked on the day of his film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be."
Even if the parties successfully reached an agreement, numerous hazards lay ahead: a volatile real estate market, the unavoidable political melodrama inherent in building upon a site of mass murder, and an often inflexible government bureaucracy embodied by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency that owns the land beneath the complex.
For 14 years, these compounding factors had caused the redevelopment process to lurch forward unpredictably, dashing the architectural ambitions of many who came before. In fact, Ingels’s design displaced an earlier concept by renowned architect Lord Norman Foster. (Turnabout is fair play, as Foster had previously edged out Ingels on a national library project in Kazakhstan.) To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels needed to balance the competing demands of Murdoch and Silverstein, who planned to market the upper half of the tower as premium office space, while juggling a flurry of other high-profile international clients.
The swift rise of BIG has inspired both awe and envy among his peers. Yet, just as a single triumphant building can cement an architect’s reputation, it takes only one disaster to ruin it. Ingels, never short on bravado, claimed he relished the pressure, comparing the ordeal to a Zen exercise: "Turning the force of your enemy into your own strength."
Overcoming Inertia and Resistance
The first force Ingels had to conquer at the World Trade Center site was sheer inertia. Silverstein initially believed he had a perfectly functioning design from Foster and harbored serious concerns regarding Ingels’s early drawings. The developer worried the stacked structure might appear asymmetrical, or even teetering, from certain angles.
"He just thought, like, could he see it fit in? No," Ingels recalled. "Was it a nice design for another place? Maybe, but not here."
Silverstein nearly rejected the proposal outright until endorsements from the architects behind other World Trade Center buildings shifted his perspective. Nevertheless, on the day of the rooftop shoot, Ingels confided that Rupert Murdoch himself wanted to review the latest iteration of the design.
The following Monday, the principal stakeholders gathered in a conference room overlooking the site. Typically unflappable, Ingels was momentarily knocked off balance by the Australian media mogul’s rapid-fire questioning. "It’s almost sort of like kangaroo boxing," Ingels observed afterward.
According to multiple sources, 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 purely an illusion. The unorthodox stepped form of the building resulted from positioning the structural inner core—which houses the elevators—off-center, thereby generating expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, sweeping outdoor terraces, and prime views of the plaza for Fox News studios. Murdoch was ultimately convinced.
"Before you get that story, most people suspect that it’s all just follies," Ingels noted. "The more blatantly the architect can explain why things are the way they are, the better."
Ingels also counted on a crucial ally: James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. It was the younger Murdoch who spearheaded the search to relocate 21st Century Fox and News Corp. from their aging headquarters near Rockefeller Center.
"It was funny," James recalled. "We sort of thought, ‘Let’s not hire a starchitect, let’s not build a big tower.’"
He initially desired an open, loftlike, creative workplace. Yet after an exhaustive exploration of potential sites, they landed at the World Trade Center with Ingels—a star architect who understood his exact desires. "We were struck by what a great problem solver he was," James said. "This is someone who can take a set of constraints and create something surprising and effective out of them."
Navigating Structural and Financial Realities
The foremost constraint involved the remnants of Foster’s previous design. As part of a political compromise between Silverstein and the Port Authority, Foster’s subterranean foundation had already been constructed to support a $4 billion underground transportation hub. The upper tower was slated for construction once Silverstein secured an anchor tenant.
However, James Murdoch felt Foster’s stodgy skyscraper failed to suit a modern media company, and Ingels dismissed the design as "a generic extrusion with a flashy hat." Piggybacking a brand-new skyscraper onto a preexisting foundation, however, created intricate structural complications, particularly in the lobby and lower floors, which had to transfer the tower’s immense weight onto older supports.
Ten days after meeting with Murdoch, Ingels was back at BIG’s offices amidst packing boxes as the firm prepared to move into a larger space. Grabbing a marker, he began sketching on a whiteboard.
"A lot of towers, as they get over a certain height, they tend toward a square footprint," Ingels explained, noting that uniform floor plates are cheaper and easier to lease. Skyscraper design is dictated by the immense forces of gravity and wind, but Ingels believed he had devised a way to reshape the high-rise genre. "We just redistributed the calories," he said.
Shortly after, Ute Rinnebach, the project manager for Two World Trade Center, rushed into the office returning from a meeting with the structural engineers.
"How did it go?" Ingels asked.
"Really bad," Rinnebach replied. "I’ve got some horrible news for you."
Ingels’s plan to retrofit the foundation involved shoring up underground walls and columns within the Port Authority’s jurisdiction—an approach that proved strictly prohibited. Much like a Jenga puzzle, removing that crucial reinforcement risked destabilizing the entire structural scheme.
Worse still, a facade consultant delivered another blow. Ingels had planned to vary the alignment of glass panes and metal mullions while using thinner materials to cut costs, which were running $60 million higher than Foster’s projected budget. However, New York Police Department security standards mandated that all facades at the World Trade Center utilize heavy, laminated safety glass to withstand potential explosions.
"I was like, fuck!" Ingels recalled. "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."
With Silverstein and Murdoch navigating a tense bargaining juncture, any deviation from standard formulas incurred steep construction-cost estimates. "Right now," Ingels admitted, "the architecture is essentially held hostage."
Resolving the Crisis
For several weeks, the project’s future remained heavily in doubt. Ingels worked tirelessly to resolve the structural and financial hurdles without completely diluting the design’s integrity. Eventually, he agreed to a series of painful structural modifications.
"I think it still sort of looks like itself," he noted hopefully.
Walking across the World Trade Center plaza one afternoon, Ingels stopped outside Four World Trade Center—designed by Fumihiko Maki—to admire its lobby sculpture, a 98-foot titanium arc. "It has no supports," Ingels said. "It just cantilevers like a motherfucker."
At that moment, Silverstein Properties executives happened to walk by, including Janno Lieber, Silverstein’s second-in-command, who offered effusive praise. "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."
"Suddenly, the sum of a lot of nudges adds up," Ingels replied.
Reflecting on the grueling process, Ingels drew upon an evolutionary metaphor. "In Darwinian evolution, the animal has two primary instincts, right? Fight or flight. 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."
That evolutionary philosophy underpins an unfortunate truth of the profession: architects must learn to live with continual defeats. In his 2009 manifesto, Yes Is More, Ingels wrote that "most architectural projects either miscarry or die in early infancy," estimating that of 200 designs produced in his first eight years, only 11 were built.
Fame has since improved those odds, connecting BIG with powerful, well-funded clients. Google, for instance, encouraged Ingels to unleash his imagination, with CEO Larry Page famously telling him regarding a parking hurdle, "It’s nothing that $50 million won’t solve." Even so, local pushback eventually led the city of Mountain View to deny development rights for parts of the massive 2.5 million-square-foot complex, proving that even tech giants face regulatory roadblocks.
A Meteoric Rise
Despite occasional setbacks, BIG’s pipeline continues to expand. In Manhattan, Ingels has simultaneously designed four major additions to the Hudson River skyline alongside the Dryline—a $335 million hybrid park and coastal flood defense system along the East River. In Washington, DC, his firm undertook a master plan for the Smithsonian Institution’s South Mall campus. Such high-profile commissions have drawn the attention of increasingly elite clients, including an NFL franchise owner who recently retained Ingels for a stadium project.
"Coming here to America five years ago, we were given the opportunity to try to reimagine the skyscraper, which is one of the great inventions of American architecture," Ingels said. "I think the American football stadium would be an awesome thing to take on."
Having founded BIG in Copenhagen just a decade prior, Ingels’s rocketing trajectory has thoroughly confounded traditional expectations in an industry where careers typically build slowly through decades of accumulated critical praise.
"He has just bypassed all the rest of the avant-garde," said Preston Scott Cohen, an acclaimed architect and Harvard Graduate School of Design professor who has taught alongside Ingels. "No one has done it that fast, with that degree of success. You name them, he has just flown right over their heads."
Historically, museum-grade architecture has been restricted to civic projects, while profit-driven office buildings remained largely utilitarian. Ingels, however, insists that BIG can remain "both pragmatic and utopian," bringing artistry to corporate office complexes and megaprojects alike.
A disciple of Rem Koolhaas—one of contemporary architecture’s greatest theorists—Ingels started his career at Koolhaas’s firm, OMA, in 1998.
"From the very first time I met Bjarke as an intern, he was fearless," recalled Joshua Prince-Ramus, another Koolhaas protégé. "He does not fear putting his ideas on the table. On anyone’s table."
While Koolhaas famously outlined his theoretical ideas in the provocative treatise Delirious New York, he never built anything of major note in the city itself. His student, by contrast, sought to leave a profoundly tangible mark.
"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 wondered aloud. Disdaining modernists whom he blames for turning offices into "boring boxes," Ingels is instead fond of quoting architect Philip Johnson’s notorious declaration: "I am a whore."
"His strength and his weakness is that he is so promiscuous," Ingels said of his own wide-ranging design ethos. "Aesthetically and academically promiscuous."
By rejecting the notion that an architect must adhere to a single personal aesthetic, Ingels maintains a cheerful flexibility that satisfies corporate clients without sacrificing design ambition. His first major American commission, the tetrahedral residential tower on West 57th Street, combined the typologies of a traditional New York high-rise and a European perimeter block, earning the nickname "courtscraper."
Douglas Durst, the property’s developer who took a significant gamble hiring Ingels in 2010 when he was largely unknown in the United States, praised his problem-solving orientation. "Many architects, when they finish a design, they tell you, that’s it, that’s my design," Durst noted. "He likes it when you give him a problem that has to get solved."
Unveiling Two World Trade Center
By early June, a tentative agreement between Silverstein and Murdoch was finally secured, allowing the parties to publicly unveil the design for Two World Trade Center. Before the public launch, however, Ingels had to secure a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the architect behind the master plan for the overall World Trade Center site. A decade prior, Libeskind had been the toast of New York before colliding with the unforgiving realities of commercial development and developer opposition.
During a private presentation in BIG’s conference room, Ingels showcased a glowing model of the tower, taking care to demonstrate how the structure respected Libeskind’s pedestrian corridor, the Wedge of Light, while utilizing diagonal lobby columns to align with Foster’s underground foundation.
"We get an almost Libeskind-esque language," Ingels explained, "defined simply by connecting the dots."
Libeskind delivered his verdict with a decisive slap on the table: "Congratulations, that is a super building." Then, with a touch of mischief, he added, "I hope we’re going to see it going up, Mr. Janno."
Initial public reviews following the June 9 unveiling were largely positive, though Libeskind aptly noted that the initial presentation was merely the easy phase. "Between that first smile and the last stone is the challenge of architecture," he observed, pointing to the complex interplay of economics, social pressures, and political power brokers.
As the project moved forward, elements of the design remained in flux, including a brief height reduction of 90 feet. The tower also drew an unexpected critique from Douglas Durst, whose company operates One World Trade Center directly adjacent to the site.
"I’m very disappointed in Bjarke’s design," Durst stated, objecting to the orientation of its stepped gardens. "He turned his back on our building. Not even metaphorically. It’s very disrespectful."
At the same time, Durst maintained that Ingels is a genuine genius, highlighting the delicate tightrope architects must walk when catering to competing clients in dense urban environments.
The Next Epic Chapter
As BIG expanded to include roughly 170 employees in New York and 100 in Copenhagen, Ingels increasingly delegated authority to his partners and senior staff, though he remained hands-on across a multitude of concurrent crises. From evaluating concrete samples for residential facades to brainstorming innovative waterfront pavilions like the "Watchflower," Ingels maintained his characteristic exuberance.
When a tentative agreement was finally reached on Two World Trade Center, Ingels and his team continued refining the lobby architecture to balance James Murdoch’s preferred "Pacific Northwest" aesthetic of wood and concrete with the stringent financial realities enforced by Silverstein’s team.
"If we really want the truth, this is the truth," Ingels conceded when informed that cheaper straight columns were financially necessary. "This is the truth in dollars."
Reflecting on his rapid ascent, Ingels likened his work to "solving a gigantic equation with multiple variables, where a lot of the variables claim to be fixed. You must find out which of the ones are actually variable."
Walking down Greenwich Street toward the World Trade Center site, Ingels framed an imaginary view with his hands and clicked his tongue like a camera shutter.
"Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit," he said. "I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
