On a misty April morning in Lower Manhattan, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels stood high above a cobblestoned street with the collar of his black coat rakishly popped, filming a promotional clip for the defining commission of his young career: the design for 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 40-year-old architect refused to let doubt stand in his way. Having obsessed over every line and image, Ingels told his director he wanted viewers to swoon. While Murdoch’s plan to relocate his companies was still one of New York real estate’s tightly guarded secrets, Ingels was eager to broadcast the news quite literally from the rooftops.
Between takes, Ingels gestured toward a void in the densely packed Manhattan skyline, tracing the profile of a skyscraper that, for the moment, existed only in his mind and preliminary renderings. From his vantage point, the proposed design resembled a stack of seven distinct 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 remarked, invoking the nation’s traditional motto: "Out of many, one."
If completed, the tower would stand among the tallest buildings in New York City and serve as the final addition to the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center site. The ensemble of towers rings two cascading reflection pools honoring the roughly 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Rather than dwelling on the solemnity of the footprint, however, Ingels aimed to write a new chapter for the location. "The memorial is about the memorial," he explained. "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." Boasting diverse talents as a draftsman, a salesman, and a charismatic cultivator of his own professional image, his greatest asset remains a rare gift for storytelling: the ability to construct a compelling narrative around practical necessities.
Often, his designs push boundaries in fantastical directions. In Copenhagen, he designed a waste-to-energy plant 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—developed in collaboration with Thomas Heatherwick—Ingels envisioned an elaborate complex of geodesic domes, offering a lifestyle of biking, hiking, and coding beneath sunlit glass terrariums.
Such imaginative flights have made Ingels internationally famous and highly sought-after at an age considered precocious by the exacting standards of the architecture profession. Yet fame can be a deceptive indicator in the industry, where an architect’s completed work, much like the light of a distant star, often reaches the public only after a years-long journey.
Ingels’ largest completed project in New York at the time—a striking pyramidal apartment building rising along the West Side Highway at 57th Street—measured 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 yet to complete a full-scale skyscraper. With Two World Trade Center, he believed he had discovered a way to reinvent the high-rise work environment, transforming a structure that is fundamentally vertical and hierarchical into a hub for horizontal interaction. The formidable challenge ahead was proving he could translate that captivating narrative into physical reality.
Navigating Corporate Real Estate and Political Realities
To realize his design, Ingels had to continually prove its value to two formidable figures: Rupert Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the veteran developer who has overseen much of the World Trade Center rebuilding effort. Before the $4 billion skyscraper could secure financing, Murdoch and Silverstein needed to finalize a long-term lease.
"There’s a lot of drama with the deal right now," Ingels admitted on the day of his promotional shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be." Even with an eventual agreement, the project faced a volatile real estate market, the political sensitivities inherent in building on a site of historic tragedy, and the bureaucratic complexities of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency that owns the underlying land.
For 14 years, these intertwined pressures had kept the redevelopment process moving in fits and starts, dismantling many ambitious architectural visions along the way. In fact, Ingels’ design had directly displaced an earlier concept by renowned architect Lord Norman Foster. (Turnabout proved fair play, as Foster had previously replaced Ingels on a national library project in Kazakhstan.) To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had to carefully balance the competing demands of Murdoch and Silverstein, who planned to market the upper half of the tower as premium office space. Simultaneously, he had to manage a rapidly expanding portfolio of high-profile commissions that had recently flooded his firm, BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group).
The swift rise of BIG inspired both widespread admiration and quiet envy among industry peers. While a single triumphant building can establish an architect’s reputation overnight, professionals are acutely aware that a single major misstep can ruin it. Nevertheless, maintaining his characteristic bravado, Ingels insisted he relished the pressure. "It is like this Zen exercise," he said. "Turning the force of your enemy into your own strength."
Overcoming Inertia and Structural Hurdles
The first major force Ingels had to confront was institutional inertia. Silverstein initially believed he was well-served by Foster’s existing design—which Foster declined to comment on—and harbored serious reservations about Ingels’ early drawings. The developer worried the stacked, staggered structure would look asymmetrical or even precariously balanced 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 walked away from the deal entirely until fellow architects of other World Trade Center buildings offered endorsements that changed his mind.
Shortly afterward, Ingels faced an even tougher audience during a Monday conference room review overlooking the site. Known for his unflappable demeanor, Ingels was momentarily thrown off balance by Murdoch’s rapid-fire interrogation. "It’s almost sort of like kangaroo boxing," Ingels remarked hours later back at his office. Murdoch’s primary concern centered on structural stability: Why doesn’t it fall over?
With assistance from David Childs, the architect behind One World Trade Center, Ingels explained that the leaning effect was an optical illusion. The unorthodox stepped geometry resulted from positioning the core—which houses essential elevator shafts—off-center. This configuration generated expansive interior spaces ideal for modern newsrooms, provided Fox News studios with direct views of the Trade Center plaza, and created accessible outdoor terraces. Murdoch was ultimately convinced. "Before you get that story, most people suspect that it’s all just follies," Ingels observed. "The more blatantly the architect can explain why things are the way they are, the better."
Ingels also found a vital ally in James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. As the 42-year-old executive driving the relocation search for 21st Century Fox and News Corp. away from their aging quarters near Rockefeller Center, James initially sought a modest workspace. "We sort of thought, ‘Let’s not hire a starchitect, let’s not build a big tower,’" James recalled. Instead, he envisioned an open, loftlike, creative environment. After an exhaustive property search, however, the team arrived at the World Trade Center—and partnered with Ingels. "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 Challenges and Compromises
The most significant constraint involved the remnants of Foster’s unfinished foundation, constructed as part of a political compromise between Silverstein and the Port Authority to support a $4 billion underground transit hub. James and Ingels both agreed that Foster’s heavy skyscraper design did not suit a modern media company. Ingels dismissively characterized the older design as "a generic extrusion with a flashy hat."
However, grafting a radically new skyscraper onto a pre-engineered foundation created complex structural hurdles, particularly at the ground level, where weight had to be redistributed onto existing subterranean supports. Shortly after winning over Murdoch and Silverstein, Ingels had to convince Silverstein’s skeptical engineers.
During a whiteboard session at BIG’s offices, Ingels explained the conventional economics of high-rises. Most towers adopt uniform square footprints above a certain height because standard floor plates are cheaper to build, easier to market, and simpler to engineer against gravity and wind loads. Ingels, however, sought to break the mold. "We just redistributed the calories," he explained.
Those ambitions hit immediate roadblocks. His project manager, Ute Rinnebach, returned from a meeting with structural engineers bearing bad news: modifying the foundation walls and columns within the Port Authority’s jurisdiction was strictly prohibited. Altering those supports risked destabilizing the entire structural scheme. Simultaneously, a facade consultant delivered another setback.
Ingels had planned to vary the alignment of glass panes and metal mullions to achieve cost savings. However, New York Police Department security standards mandated that all exterior glass at the World Trade Center site must be heavy laminated safety glass to withstand potential explosive impacts. "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 from explosions."
As bargaining between Silverstein and Murdoch grew tense, any deviation from standard construction formulas incurred premium cost estimates. "Right now," Ingels noted, "the architecture is essentially held hostage."
Evolving Designs and Pragmatic Solutions
For several weeks, the project’s fate hung in the balance. Working closely with engineers, Ingels ultimately agreed to pragmatic structural modifications to keep the project alive. "I think it still sort of looks like itself," he said cautiously.
Walking across the World Trade Center plaza near Fumihiko Maki’s sleek Four World Trade Center, Ingels encountered Janno Lieber, Silverstein’s second-in-command. "I gotta tell you, I gotta give you a hug," Lieber said, praising the design team’s rapid adjustments. "That was a helluva turnaround that you guys did in the last week."
Reflecting on the experience, Ingels embraced the evolutionary nature of architectural problem-solving. "In Darwinian evolution, the animal has two primary instincts, right? Fight or flight," he observed. "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."
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. While fame and high-profile clients increased his success rate, setbacks still occurred. Even Google experienced development limitations when the city of Mountain View denied permits for portions of their proposed campus.
Nevertheless, BIG’s pipeline continued to expand. In Manhattan alone, Ingels spearheaded four major waterfront additions to the skyline and designed the $335 million hybrid park and flood defense system known as the Dryline along the East River. In Washington, DC, he took on a master plan for the Smithsonian Institution’s South Mall campus. Reflecting on his move to the United States, Ingels noted, "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."
Balancing Ambition and Pragmatism
Ingels founded BIG in Copenhagen just a decade prior. His meteoric rise has confounded expectations in an industry where careers typically advance through slow, incremental recognition. "He has just bypassed all the rest of the avant-garde," said Preston Scott Cohen, an architect and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. "No one has done it that fast, with that degree of success."
Rooted in the theoretical teachings of Rem Koolhaas—whom Ingels worked under at OMA beginning in 1998—Ingels combined utopian design thinking with commercial pragmatism. Unlike Koolhaas, who established legendary theoretical frameworks like Delirious New York without constructing major buildings in the city, Ingels aggressively sought tangible, large-scale realizations.
His first major American commission, the tetrahedral residential tower on 57th Street known as VIA 57 West, embodied this hybrid approach—merging the typology of a classic New York high-rise with a European perimeter courtyard. Douglas Durst, the project’s developer, praised Ingels’ collaborative spirit: "Many architects, when they finish a design, they tell you, that’s it, that’s my design. He likes it when you give him a problem that has to get solved."
By early June, a tentative lease agreement between Silverstein and Murdoch was established, paving the way for the public unveiling of Two World Trade Center. Before the announcement, Ingels presented the updated model to architect Daniel Libeskind, author of the site’s original master plan.
Gathered in BIG’s conference room, the architects reviewed the glowing physical model. Ingels highlighted how the design preserved Libeskind’s concept of the "Wedge of Light" plaza and explained the diagonal columns designed to interface with Foster’s preexisting foundation. Libeskind offered an enthusiastic endorsement, slapping the table and declaring, "Congratulations, that is a super building."
Yet, as Libeskind noted, unveiling a design was merely the beginning. "Between that first smile and the last stone is the challenge of architecture," he observed, pointing to the complex interplay of economics, social dynamics, power brokers, and politicians that defines urban development.
As Two World Trade Center continued to evolve—experiencing minor adjustments to its height and massing—it also drew critique from unexpected corners. Douglas Durst voiced public disappointment with the orientation of its stepped gardens, suggesting the design turned its back on neighboring One World Trade Center. Such friction underscored the delicate balancing act facing Ingels as his firm expanded rapidly across international markets.
Despite the intense administrative demands of running offices in New York and Copenhagen with hundreds of staff members, Ingels remained deeply hands-on, intervening directly in facade concrete testing, custom residential concepts in California, and pavilion engineering in Brooklyn.
During a review of the World Trade Center lobby structure with Janno Lieber and project managers, Ingels confronted the persistent realities of construction budgets. When informed that his intricate sloping column solution exceeded financial limits, Ingels pivoted without hesitation. "If we really want the truth, this is the truth. This is the truth in dollars."
Reflecting on his trajectory over a Tribeca breakfast, Ingels dismissed the rigidity of traditional starchitects who struggle when confronted with practical constraints. Instead, he viewed architecture as the art of navigating complex multi-variable equations.
"Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit," Ingels said, framing an empty stretch of Manhattan air with his hands and mimicking a camera shutter. "I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
