On a misty April morning, Bjarke Ingels stood on the roof of a historic brick building high above the cobblestone streets of Lower Manhattan, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped. The Danish architect was shooting a promotional film for what is unquestionably the most high-stakes commission of his 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 sign-off. But the hyper-eloquent 40-year-old architect refused to let doubt stand in the way of his vision. He had obsessed over every line and image of the project, telling his director that he wanted viewers to swoon. At this moment, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his media empire was still one of New York real estate’s most closely guarded secrets. Yet Ingels could barely contain his excitement, eager to shout 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 now, existed only in his imagination. From this unique vantage point, Ingels’ 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," he said. "Out of many, one."
If completed, the tower will stand among the tallest buildings in New York City and serve as the final piece in the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center site. The architectural ensemble will ring two cascading reflecting pools that pay solemn tribute to the roughly 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But Ingels was not preoccupied with crafting a monument to tragedy; he wanted to make his own history for the living city.
"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 master salesman, and the charming cultivator of his own winning image—but his greatest asset is an undeniable gift for storytelling. He possesses an uncanny ability to construct a compelling narrative around the most practical and rigid necessities. Often, his designs careen in wildly 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 designed 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 an 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 by traditional architecture standards. Yet fame can be a deceptive indicator in his profession, where an architect’s built work, much like the light of a distant star, only reaches the public eye after a grueling, years-long journey.
Ingels’ largest completed project in New York at the time, a striking pyramidal apartment building under construction along Manhattan’s West Side Highway at 57th Street, 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 the sobering reality of his resume: "We still haven’t completed a skyscraper."
With Two World Trade Center, Ingels believed he had devised a way to create an entirely new kind of high-rise work environment, turning a form that is fundamentally vertical and hierarchical into a dynamic space for horizontal interaction. But first came the laborious, grinding part: proving that he was 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 strictly adhering to a single, rigid aesthetic, he tailors his ideas to meet the distinct demands of his clients—all in service of creating designs unlike anything seen before.
To realize his design, however, Ingels had to continually prove its immense value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Rupert Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the veteran developer who has controlled much of the World Trade Center rebuilding effort. Murdoch and Silverstein still had to agree on a long-term commercial lease, a crucial financial domino that would allow the $4 billion skyscraper to be built.
"There’s a lot of drama with the deal right now," Ingels said on the day of his promotional film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be."
Even if the powerful parties came to an agreement, there were countless other hazards to navigate: a volatile real estate market, the inherent political melodrama of building on a site of mass murder, and an often inflexible 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 combined factors had conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, dashing the architectural ambitions of many who came before. Ingels’ design had actually displaced an earlier concept by renowned architect Lord Norman Foster. (Turnabout is fair play, as Foster had previously pushed aside Ingels on a library project in Kazakhstan.)
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 premium office space. At the same time, he was juggling a flood of new clients who had recently retained his rapidly expanding firm.
The first force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center site was institutional inertia. Silverstein initially believed he had a perfectly good design from Foster and harbored serious reservations about Ingels’ early drawings. He worried the stacked structure would look asymmetrical, and even teetering, from certain street-level perspectives.
"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 almost rejected the entire proposal before an endorsement from the architects of other surrounding World Trade Center buildings finally changed his mind.
The following Monday, the key principals gathered in a conference room overlooking the site. Usually unflappable, Ingels was momentarily knocked off balance by the combative media mogul’s rapid-fire questioning.
"It’s almost sort of like kangaroo boxing," Ingels said hours afterward, back at his office. Murdoch’s deepest concern boiled down to a fundamental question: Why doesn’t it fall over?
With assistance from David Childs, the courtly architect behind One World Trade Center, Ingels explained that the leaning effect was an optical illusion. The unorthodox stepped form of the building was the result of placing the core—which houses crucial elevator shafts—in an off-center position. This layout produced expansive interior spaces for modern newsrooms, sweeping views of the plaza from Fox News studios, and sprawling outdoor terraces. Ultimately, Murdoch was convinced.
"Before you get that story, most people suspect that it’s all just follies," Ingels explained. "The more blatantly the architect can explain why things are the way they are, the better."
In his efforts, Ingels counted on a powerful internal ally: James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. It was the younger Murdoch who served as the driving force behind the decision to relocate 21st Century Fox and News Corp. from an aging building near Rockefeller Center.
"We sort of thought, ‘Let’s not hire a starchitect, let’s not build a big tower,’" James recalled, noting that he initially wanted an open, loftlike, creative workplace. But after exploring various sites, he arrived at the World Trade Center—and partnered with Ingels, a star who understood his operational desires. "We were struck by what a great problem solver he was. This is someone who can take a set of constraints and create something surprising and effective out of them."
The foremost physical constraint involved the remnants of Foster’s previous design. As a result 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. The rest of the tower was contingent on securing an anchor tenant.
James Murdoch, however, felt Foster’s stodgy skyscraper did not suit a modern media company. Ingels was similarly dismissive, describing the concept as "a generic extrusion with a flashy hat."
Piggybacking a new skyscraper onto an existing foundation created complex structural hurdles, especially in the lobby and lower floors, which had to be engineered to transfer the tower’s immense weight onto preexisting supports. What Ingels designed high in the air had to seamlessly connect with what was already set deep in the ground.
Shortly after winning over the developer and tenant, Ingels faced another skeptical audience: Silverstein’s structural engineers. Ten days after his meeting with Murdoch, Ingels stood in his chaotic, half-packed office—his firm was preparing to move into a larger space—and used a marker on a whiteboard to explain his approach.
"A lot of towers, as they get over a certain height, tend toward a square footprint," he explained, noting that uniform floor plates are cheaper and easier to lease. But Ingels believed he could shape his skyscraper differently. "We just redistributed the calories."
Moments later, Ute Rinnebach, his project manager for Two World Trade Center, rushed back from a meeting with the engineers.
"How did it go?" Ingels asked.
"Really bad," Rinnebach replied. "I’ve got some horrible news for you."
Ingels’ original idea for retrofitting the foundation involved shoring up walls and columns within the Port Authority’s underground domain—a move that was strictly prohibited. Removing that crucial bit of reinforcement threatened to destabilize the entire structural scheme.
To compound the pressure, a facade consultant delivered another blow. Ingels had planned to use thinner glass panels on parts of the building to reduce costs, which were running $60 million higher than Foster’s design. 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 from explosions."
With Silverstein and Murdoch locked in tense lease negotiations, any departure from standard construction formulas was heavily penalized in cost estimates.
"Right now," Ingels remarked, "the architecture is essentially held hostage."
For weeks, the fate of the project hung in the balance. Ingels ultimately averted disaster by agreeing to a series of painful structural revisions, though he remained hopeful that the core design’s integrity survived. His optimism was rewarded when he crossed paths with Janno Lieber, Silverstein’s second-in-command, near the World Trade Center plaza.
"I gotta tell you, I gotta give you a hug," Lieber said, praising the team’s rapid engineering turnaround. "That was a helluva turnaround that you guys did in the last week."
Reflecting on the grueling process, Ingels leaned into his favorite philosophical metaphors.
"In Darwinian evolution, the animal has two primary instincts, right? Fight or flight," Ingels observed. "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 adaptability has defined Ingels’ meteoric career. In his 2009 manifesto, Yes Is More, he wrote that "most architectural projects either miscarry or die in early infancy," estimating that out of 200 designs produced in his first eight years, only 11 were built. Fame and high-profile clients have drastically improved those odds, allowing BIG to take on massive commissions across the globe, from the Smithsonian’s South Mall campus master plan in Washington, D.C., to a $335 million hybrid park and flood defense system known as the Dryline in New York.
Yet, even as his firm expands at a historic pace, the realities of urban development remain unforgiving. As Preston Scott Cohen, an acclaimed architect and Harvard professor, noted, Ingels has bypassed the traditional avant-garde trajectory with unprecedented speed.
"No one has done it that fast, with that degree of success," Cohen said. "You name them, he has just flown right over their heads."
By early June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch was finally in place, allowing the team to publicly unveil the design for Two World Trade Center. Before doing so, however, Ingels sought a final blessing from architect Daniel Libeskind, whose master plan forms the blueprint for the entire World Trade Center site.
During a presentation at BIG’s offices, Ingels showed how his design respected Libeskind’s famed Wedge of Light plaza and explained how his sloping lobby columns solved the structural alignment puzzle.
Libeskind delivered his verdict with a firm slap on the table: "Congratulations, that is a super building."
Initial public reviews of the design were largely positive, but Libeskind offered a lingering warning about the road ahead. Between a celebrated design and a completed building lies the complex reality of urban development—a space filled with economics, power brokers, and politicians.
As negotiations and minor design tweaks continued, Ingels remained philosophical about the constant friction between utopian imagination and pragmatic execution. Juggling crisis after crisis—from concrete samples to client revisions—he continually returned to the whiteboard, refining his ideas to align with the unyielding language of dollars and cents.
For Bjarke Ingels, the skyscraper taking shape above the Manhattan skyline represents more than just a massive corporate commission. It is the ultimate test of whether architectural ambition can survive the harsh crucible of reality. Standing near the footprint of the World Trade Center, looking toward the space where his creation would soon rise, Ingels flashed a confident grin.
"Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit," he said. "I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
