On a misty April morning in Lower Manhattan, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels stood on the roof of an old brick building high above a cobblestoned street, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped. He 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 give his final approval. The hyper-eloquent 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 remained one of New York real estate’s biggest secrets, but Ingels was eager 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 serve as the final structure envisioned in the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center site. The ensemble of buildings rings two cascading pools that pay tribute to the roughly 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Yet Ingels was not preoccupied with the past; he wanted to make his own history. "The memorial is about the memorial," he noted. "The tower should be about the living city."
Eclecticism on Demand
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 the 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.
For instance, he oversaw the construction of a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen featuring a slanted roof that serves 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—along with collaborator 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 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—later named 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 still hadn’t completed a skyscraper. With Two World Trade Center, he believed he had imagined a way to create a new kind of high-rise work environment, one that turned a form fundamentally vertical and hierarchical into a place for horizontal interaction. The laborious part, however, was proving he could transform that captivating story into hard facts on the ground.
Playing playfully with the name of his firm, BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), Ingels described his approach to architecture as "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.
Navigating Power and Politics
To realize his design, Ingels continually had to prove its value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Rupert Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the developer who controlled much of the World Trade Center rebuilding. Murdoch and Silverstein had to agree on a long-term lease to finance the $4 billion skyscraper.
"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 reached an agreement, other hazards loomed: a volatile real estate market, the political melodrama inherent in building on a site of mass murder, and an often irrational government, embodied by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency that owned the land beneath the Trade Center.
For 14 years, these factors conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, upending many architectural ambitions. In fact, Ingels’ design displaced an earlier one by Lord Norman Foster. To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had 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 major force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center was sheer inertia. Silverstein initially favored Foster’s design and harbored serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings, fearing the stacked structure would look asymmetrical or teetering from certain perspectives. Silverstein almost rejected the deal entirely until receiving endorsements from the architects of other World Trade Center buildings.
Shortly after, Ingels faced a high-stakes review with Rupert Murdoch himself. Gathering in a conference room overlooking the site, Ingels was initially tested by the Australian media mogul’s rapid-fire questioning. Murdoch’s deepest 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 illusion. The unorthodox stepped form of the building resulted 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 for Fox News studios, and outdoor terraces. Murdoch was ultimately sold.
"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 found a powerful ally in James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. As the driving force behind the relocation of 21st Century Fox and News Corp. from an aging building near Rockefeller Center, the younger Murdoch sought an open, loftlike, creative workplace. "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."
Engineering Realities and Compromises
The foremost physical constraint involved the remnants of Foster’s design. Because 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, especially on the lower floors, which had to shift the tower’s weight onto preexisting supports.
Technical hurdles soon mounted. Ingels learned that New York Police Department security standards required all facades at the World Trade Center to be constructed from heavy laminated safety glass to withstand potential explosions, dashing plans to use thinner, cheaper materials to offset mounting costs. Furthermore, initial ideas for retrofitting the foundation underground ran up against Port Authority restrictions.
For a few weeks, the fate of the project hung in the balance. Silverstein and Murdoch pushed through a tense bargaining juncture, and Ingels had to agree to painful structural changes. Yet, by making strategic compromises, he preserved the building’s distinctive identity.
Janno Lieber, Silverstein’s second-in-command, praised the turnaround during a chance encounter near the site. "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."
By early June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch was in place, allowing the parties to publicly unveil the design for Two World Trade Center. Before doing so, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the architect behind the master plan for the complex. In BIG’s conference room, Ingels demonstrated how his design respected Libeskind’s original vision, including the "Wedge of Light" plaza. Libeskind gave his approval with a slap on the table, declaring, "Congratulations, that is a super building."
A Rapidly Expanding Footprint
As BIG expanded—opening new offices on Broadway with a staff growing past 250 employees—Ingels balanced multiple high-profile projects simultaneously. In Manhattan, his firm designed four major additions to the Hudson River skyline and conceived the Dryline, a $335 million hybrid park and flood defense system along the East River designed to protect the city from future climate disasters. In Washington, D.C., BIG undertook a master plan for the Smithsonian Institution’s South Mall campus.
Despite setbacks, such as Mountain View officials denying development rights for a portion of the expansive Google campus, Ingels maintained that architecture requires navigating practical boundaries. Reflecting on his rapid rise, Harvard Graduate School of Design professor Preston Scott Cohen noted, "He has just bypassed all the rest of the avant-garde. No one has done it that fast, with that degree of success."
Ingels views his work not as an adherence to a single dogma, but as an ongoing exercise in problem-solving. Comparing the design process to evolution, he noted that the eureka moment often arrives when an architect abandons a rigid stance to explore new territory.
As negotiations on Two World Trade Center progressed through the summer and the complex realities of economics, politics, and engineering tested his vision, Ingels remained characteristically optimistic. Standing near the World Trade Center site, looking toward where the new tower would rise, he captured his enduring outlook on the profession:
"Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit," he said. "I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
