By Andrew Rice
On a misty April day, Bjarke Ingels stands 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 is shooting a promotional film about the most important commission of his young career: his design for the skyscraper known as Two World Trade Center. It is still very much a work in progress, and his primary client—the imperious media magnate Rupert Murdoch—has yet to formally sign off. Yet the hyper-eloquent 40-year-old does not let doubt stand in the way of his video introduction. He has obsessed over every line and image, telling his director that he wants viewers to swoon. At this moment, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his companies is still one of New York real estate’s best-kept secrets, but Ingels can hardly wait to shout the news, quite literally, from the rooftops.
Between takes, Ingels points to a void in the densely packed Manhattan skyline, tracing the profile of a skyscraper that only he can see. From this perspective, his design resembles 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 says. "Out of many, one."
If completed, the tower will rank among the tallest buildings in New York City, serving as the final piece in the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center. The architectural ensemble rings two cascading pools that pay tribute to the roughly 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But Ingels is not preoccupied with memorializing the past; he wants to make his own history.
"The memorial is about the memorial," he tells me. "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, as a salesman, and as the charming cultivator of his own winning image—but his greatest asset is a gift for storytelling: an ability to construct a compelling narrative around practical necessities. Often, his designs careen in fantastical directions. He is currently building 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, designed a wildly 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 public eye after a years-long journey.
Ingels’ largest project to date, a striking pyramidal apartment building under construction along Manhattan’s West Side Highway at 57th Street, is just 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 acknowledges. "We still haven’t completed a skyscraper."
With Two World Trade Center, Ingels believes he has imagined a way to create a new kind of high-rise work environment—one that turns a form traditionally defined by verticality and hierarchy into a space for horizontal interaction. Now comes the laborious part: showing that he is capable of transforming 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 adhere to a single aesthetic, he tailors his ideas to meet demanding client specifications—all in service of designs unlike anything seen before.
To realize his design, however, Ingels has to continually 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 effort. Murdoch and Silverstein still have to agree on a long-term lease, the financial bedrock required to fund the $4 billion skyscraper.
"There’s a lot of drama with the deal right now," Ingels says on the day of the film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be."
Even if the parties come to an agreement, formidable hazards remain: a volatile real estate market, the political melodrama inherent in building on a site of mass murder, and an often intractable government bureaucracy embodied by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency that owns the underlying land.
For 14 years, these factors have conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching unpredictably, leveling many an architectural ambition. Ingels’ design actually displaced an earlier one by 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 must balance the sometimes conflicting demands of Murdoch and Silverstein, who plan to market the top half of the building as office space. He must manage this while simultaneously juggling other high-profile clients who have recently showered business on BIG. Ingels’ dazzlingly swift rise has inspired awe and envy among his peers, but in architecture, it takes only one disaster to ruin a hard-earned reputation.
Ingels, never short on bravado, says he relishes the pressure. "It is like this Zen exercise," he says. "Turning the force of your enemy into your own strength."
The first force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center was institutional inertia. Silverstein believed he already had a perfectly good design from Foster—who declined to comment for this article—and the developer harbored serious reservations about Ingels’ early drawings. He worried the stacked structure would look asymmetrical, even teetering, from certain 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 almost rejected the entire proposal until an endorsement from the architects behind other World Trade Center buildings changed his mind. Yet that day on the roof, Ingels confides that Rupert Murdoch wants to personally review the latest iterations of the design.
The following Monday, the principals gathered in a conference room overlooking the site. Usually unflappable, Ingels was knocked off balance by the combative Australian media mogul’s rapid-fire questioning.
"It’s almost sort of like kangaroo boxing," Ingels says hours afterward, back at his office.
Murdoch’s deepest concern, according to multiple sources, boiled down to a fundamental question: Why doesn’t it fall over? With assistance from David Childs, the courtly architect of One World Trade Center, Ingels explained that the leaning effect is an optical illusion. The unorthodox stepped form of the building stems from placing the inner core—which houses crucial elevator shafts—in an off-center position, creating expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, views of the plaza from Fox News studios, and accessible outdoor terraces. Murdoch was sold.
"Before you get that story, most people suspect that it’s all just follies," Ingels tells me. "The more blatantly the architect can explain why things are the way they are, the better."
In his efforts, Ingels found a powerful ally in James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. It was James, 42, who drove 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 says. "We sort of thought, ‘Let’s not hire a starchitect, let’s not build a big tower.’"
He wanted an open, loftlike, creative workplace. But after an extended exploration of potential sites, he ended up at the World Trade Center—and paired with Ingels, a star who understood his vision.
"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 foremost constraint involved Foster’s legacy, or rather the remnants of his design. As a result of a political compromise between Silverstein and the Port Authority, Foster’s foundation had already been constructed to support a $4 billion underground transportation hub. The rest of the tower was supposed to rise once Silverstein secured an anchor tenant. But James did not think Foster’s stodgy skyscraper suited a media company’s needs, and Ingels was similarly dismissive, calling the design "a generic extrusion with a flashy hat."
Piggybacking a new skyscraper onto Foster’s foundation, however, created tricky structural hurdles. The lobby and lower floors had to be engineered to shift the new tower’s weight onto preexisting supports. Whatever Ingels dreamed up high in the air had to physically connect to what was already set deep in the ground. Consequently, after winning over the developer and his tenant, Ingels had to convince yet another skeptical audience: Silverstein’s engineers.
Ten days after meeting with Murdoch, I return to BIG’s offices, where everything is boxed up ahead of a move to a larger space. Ingels is in his usual state of chic dishevelment, grabbing a marker to draw on a whiteboard.
"A lot of towers, as they get over a certain height, they tend toward a square footprint," Ingels explains.
This generic form is driven by cost, marketing—uniform floor plates are easier to lease—and engineering realities. A skyscraper must withstand massive gravitational and wind forces. Yet Ingels believed he could shape his skyscraper differently.
"We just redistributed the calories," he says.
Just then, Ute Rinnebach, project manager for Two World Trade Center, bursts into the office, returning 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 for retrofitting the foundation involved shoring up walls and columns underground within the Port Authority’s domain, which proved to be forbidden territory. Like a Jenga tower, removing that crucial bit of reinforcement threatened the entire structural scheme. Ingels darted across the office to consult computer models with his team. As they scrambled for solutions, he entered a meeting with a facade consultant who delivered another crushing blow.
Ingels had devised complex ideas for varying the alignment of the tower’s glass panes and metal mullions. To bring down the price of the facade—which consultants estimated was running $60 million over Foster’s budget—Ingels thought he could use thinner materials in certain areas. Instead, the consultant informed him that New York Police Department security standards require all facades at the World Trade Center to be built with heavier laminated safety glass.
"I was like, fuck!" Ingels tells me later. "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."
With Silverstein and Murdoch negotiating a tense bargain, any deviation from standard formulas incurred steep cost premiums.
"Right now," Ingels says, "the architecture is essentially held hostage."
For weeks, the project’s fate remained in doubt.
"It’s trying to resolve all these issues without totally bastardizing the design," Ingels says one day in May, walking toward his Tribeca apartment to pack for a trip to Cannes. He mentions an impromptu visit from Silverstein. "He said, ‘You know, this is a historical moment, we can make this happen. We need to make this deal happen, and to do that, we need to make the design happen. There are these outstanding issues, and you, my friend, are the one who can solve them.’"
Yet engineers remained fixated on the massing—the overall shape and size of the building.
"At some point, everybody gets a little nervous about the whole thing," Ingels says, "and drastic solutions go on the table."
Ultimately, Ingels averted disaster by agreeing to painful structural compromises.
"I think it still sort of looks like itself," he says hopefully.
Cutting across the World Trade Center plaza, the architect pauses at the lobby window of Four World Trade Center, the sleek tower designed by Fumihiko Maki, to admire its lobby sculpture—a 98-foot titanium arc.
"It has no supports," Ingels notes. "It just cantilevers like a motherfucker."
At that moment, a group of Silverstein Properties executives walks by to share encouraging news from a morning meeting.
"I gotta tell you, I gotta give you a hug," says Janno Lieber, Silverstein’s second-in-command. "That was a helluva turnaround that you guys did in the last week."
"Suddenly, the sum of a lot of nudges adds up," Ingels replies.
As we walk away, Ingels smiles. "That was good, I got a hug from Janno."
Continuing around the eastern perimeter, he picks up our earlier conversation. "I really like this idea that architecture is the art and science of trying to make everybody happy. Potentially, somewhere out there, there’s a design that can actually satisfy every dream, by being different."
Passing tourists photographing Santiago Calatrava’s expensive transit hub—an infamous example of architecture executed without concessions—Ingels reflects on the creative process.
"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 or climb into the tree… In architecture, sometimes the eureka moment is actually when you give up a stance and say, OK, we have to try something else."
This evolutionary metaphor rationalizes an unfortunate truth: architects must 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 his odds by pairing him with affluent and influential clients. Google encouraged him to let his imagination run wild—when faced with a parking dilemma, Ingels recalls CEO Larry Page telling him, "It’s nothing that $50 million won’t solve." Yet the city of Mountain View ultimately denied the development rights needed for the entire 2.5 million-square-foot complex. Even the world’s most powerful companies hear no.
Ingels insists press coverage of that setback was overblown, noting that Google is proceeding with at least one domed building. Meanwhile, more work flows into BIG every day. In Manhattan alone, Ingels is simultaneously designing four major additions to the Hudson River skyline alongside a $335 million hybrid park and flood defense system known as the Dryline along the East River. In Washington, DC, he is drafting a master plan for the Smithsonian’s South Mall campus. Each high-profile commission draws BIG toward clients of even greater influence, 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 says. "I think the American football stadium would be an awesome thing to take on."
Having founded BIG in Copenhagen just a decade ago, Ingels’ rocket-fueled trajectory has confounded traditional expectations in an industry where careers typically build through a slow accrual of critical appreciation.
"He has just bypassed all the rest of the avant-garde," says 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."
Because of complexity, expense, and professional egos, museum-grade architecture has long been restricted to civic projects, while profit-driven office buildings remained utilitarian domains. Ingels aims to make BIG "both pragmatic and utopian," seeing no reason why artistry cannot define corporate offices and mega-scale sports arenas.
"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."
Ingels is a disciple of Rem Koolhaas, starting his career at OMA in 1998.
"From the very first time I met Bjarke as an intern, he was fearless," says Joshua Prince-Ramus, another Koolhaas protégé. "He does not fear putting his ideas on the table. On anyone’s table."
Ingels eventually struck out on his own, but Koolhaas’ influence remained. When Ingels describes the Manhattan skyline as "a raw agglomeration of evidence of commerce and finance and creativity and productivity," it sounds straight out of Koolhaas’ textbook treatise Delirious New York—though Koolhaas never built anything of note in the city.
"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 wonders aloud in his apartment, lounging with his legs thrown over a chair arm.
Though he disdains Modernists for turning office buildings into "boring boxes," Ingels is fond of a famous Philip Johnson quote: "I am a whore."
"His strength and his weakness is that he is so promiscuous," Ingels says of Johnson. "Aesthetically and academically promiscuous."
That up-for-anything style enables Ingels to comfortably meet corporate demands without adhering to a single personal aesthetic. His World Trade Center design is "Janus-faced," presenting a conservative front toward the memorial while offering an adventurous profile from elsewhere. His first major American commission, the residential tower on 57th Street, is what he calls a "courtscraper," blending elements of a New York high-rise and a European courtyard building. Douglas Durst, the property’s owner and a prominent New York developer, took a significant gamble in hiring an unknown Ingels in 2010.
"Many architects, when they finish a design, they tell you, that’s it, that’s my design," Durst says. "He likes it when you give him a problem that has to get solved."
Touring Via 57 West, Ingels looks down at the courtyard, noting with amusement that it "has the same dimensions as Central Park, only 13,000 times smaller."
While he admits it can be heartbreaking to see a building completed because "all you see is the sum of the failures," here he feels sublime satisfaction.
"We lost a lot of battles here," he says. "That’s why, in a way, you should really celebrate it as a miracle when something out of the ordinary happens."
BIG’s new offices occupy the top floor of an early-20th-century terra-cotta building on Broadway near Wall Street. On opening day, Ingels strolls in jauntily as young international architects settle at long desks in the spare loft space.
"Where did all these people come from?" he shouts, noting that BIG now employs 170 people in New York and 100 in Copenhagen. Pointing out a window facing north toward the World Trade Center, he smiles. "So, pretty epic."
Epic is a favorite adjective for Ingels, who rarely employs understatement. His boyish enthusiasm proves invaluable when wooing clients.
"You want to hire somebody in whose orbit you will enjoy being for the three, four, five years you’re going to be working with them," says Mary Ann Tighe, a top executive at real estate brokerage CBRE, who represents the Murdochs. "He embodies that sense of promise: This is going to be great, this is going to be fun."
Welcoming staff to their new home with midmorning champagne and Frank Sinatra’s "New York, New York," Ingels delivers a speech highlighting upcoming projects, including a second Manhattan skyscraper.
"It’s not every day that you do a 1,200-foot tower in New York City," he quips. "But it feels like every day."
By early June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch fell into place, enabling the public unveiling of Two World Trade Center. Before that, however, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, whose master plan guides the entire site. Libeskind offered a cautionary example: a decade ago, he was New York’s darling before colliding with development realities and facing acrimonious disputes with Silverstein.
Meeting in BIG’s conference room, Silverstein executives joined the two architects for a presentation centered around a glowing plastic model of the tower. Ingels demonstrated how his design respected Libeskind’s Wedge of Light plaza and explained how diagonal columns in the lobby resolved structural alignment challenges with Foster’s foundation.
"We get an almost Libeskind-esque language," Ingels said, "defined simply by connecting the dots."
Libeskind delivered his verdict with a sharp slap on the table. "Congratulations, that is a super building," he said, turning to Janno Lieber with a touch of mischief. "I hope we’re going to see it going up, Mr. Janno."
Initial public reviews following the June 9 unveiling were largely positive, but Libeskind understood the road ahead.
"Between that first smile and the last stone is the challenge of architecture," he noted, pointing to the complex realities of economics, society, power brokers, and politicians.
Design elements remained in flux. The tower briefly lost one of its seven stacked boxes before regaining it, though the building’s height shrank by 90 feet. Meanwhile, Douglas Durst—operator of the neighboring One World Trade Center—offered a dissenting critique.
"I’m very disappointed in Bjarke’s design," Durst said, objecting to the orientation of the stepped gardens. "He turned his back on our building. Not even metaphorically. It’s very disrespectful."
Though Durst maintained that Ingels is a genius, his critique highlighted the risks of rapid expansion. Every client demands undivided attention, and satisfying everyone proves impossible.
As BIG expanded, Ingels delegated authority to 11 partners and a talented staff, but the firm remained deeply personal. Returning to New York from Europe in July, Ingels waded straight into a series of crises, from concrete facade samples for a residential building to architectural pushback from a tech executive building a Palo Alto home.
The next morning, Ingels visited the Two World Trade Center design team inside Silverstein’s headquarters. Ute Rinnebach briefed him on the lobby columns, where the expensive "Libeskind-esque" sloping design faced cost pressures. While Ingels worried straight columns would clutter lower floors, Rinnebach recommended simplification.
"I could live with that," Ingels concluded. "If we really want the truth, this is the truth. This is the truth in dollars."
Janno Lieber soon dropped by to reinforce the point. "I think we would welcome design ideas from you guys. But the real issue, Bjarke, is not any design aspect. It’s really just about the cost."
"Nobody wants to pay $12 million to $15 million more for structure," Ingels agreed.
Following Lieber’s departure, the team discussed lobby aesthetics, noting James Murdoch’s preference for a Pacific Northwest timber-and-concrete aesthetic. Seeking to infuse a narrative, Ingels suggested materials like brass and cobblestones to evoke old New York.
"It’s got a good story to it," he said.
Architects do not get to write their own endings, but Ingels remains content working within pragmatic boundaries.
"A lot of the starchitects have started their careers doing some high-end sculptural projects," he reflected 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."
Aspiring to be a different kind of architectural star, Ingels likens the challenge of realizing his skyscraper to solving a gigantic equation with multiple variables. Stepping out into the sunny morning and walking down Greenwich Street toward the World Trade Center, he frames a box in the air 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."
