On a misty April morning, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels stood on the roof of an old brick building high above the cobblestoned streets of Lower Manhattan, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped. The 40-year-old architect was shooting a promotional film for what would become the most consequential commission of his young career: a radical 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 not yet officially signed off. Yet Ingels, hyper-eloquent and brimming with confidence, refused to let doubt stand in the way. He had obsessed over every line and image, telling his director that he wanted viewers to swoon. Murdoch’s plan to relocate his corporate empire was still one of New York real estate’s tightly guarded secrets, but Ingels was ready to shout the news from the rooftops.
Between takes, Ingels pointed toward a void in the densely packed Manhattan skyline, tracing the profile of a skyscraper that, for the moment, only he could see. From his vantage point, his design resembled a stack of seven blocks, ascending like a massive 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 said. "Out of many, one."
If completed, the tower would 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 ensemble of buildings rings two cascading reflection pools honoring the roughly 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But Ingels was not preoccupied with replicating the solemnity of the footprint. "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 possesses many talents—as a draftsman, a salesman, and a charming cultivator of his own winning image—but his greatest asset is a gift for storytelling: an ability to construct an engaging narrative around practical necessities. Often, his designs careen in fantastical directions. He designed 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—collaborating with 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 precocious by architecture standards. Yet fame can be a deceptive indicator in his profession, where an architect’s work often only reaches the public 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 known as Via 57 West, was 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 acknowledged, noting that he had not yet completed a single skyscraper. With Two World Trade Center, Ingels believed he had found a way to reinvent the high-rise work environment, transforming a form that is fundamentally vertical and hierarchical into a place for horizontal interaction. The laborious part, however, would be proving he could translate 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 adhering to a single rigid aesthetic, he tailors his ideas to meet demanding client specifications, all in service of designs unlike anything seen before.
To realize his design, Ingels had to continually prove its value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Rupert Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the developer controlling much of the World Trade Center rebuilding effort. Murdoch and Silverstein still needed 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 the day of his 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 tragedy, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the lumbering transportation agency owning the land beneath the towers.
For 14 years, these factors had conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, leveling many architectural ambitions in the process. Ingels’ design had actually displaced an earlier concept by Lord Norman Foster. (Turnabout was fair play: Foster had previously pushed aside Ingels on a project for a national library in Kazakhstan.) To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had to balance the sometimes 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 flooded BIG with work.
The first major force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center was institutional inertia. Silverstein believed he had a perfectly good design from Foster—who declined to comment for the project—and harbored serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings. He worried the stacked structure would look 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 entire deal before an endorsement from the architects of other World Trade Center buildings changed his mind. But on the day of the rooftop shoot, Ingels received word that Rupert Murdoch wanted to review the latest design iteration.
The following Monday, the principals gathered in a conference room overlooking the site. Unflappable by nature, Ingels was momentarily knocked off balance by the Australian media mogul’s rapid-fire questioning.
"It’s almost sort of like kangaroo boxing," Ingels remarked afterward.
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 an optical illusion. The unorthodox stepped form resulted from placing the inner core—which houses crucial elevator shafts—in an off-center position, creating expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, outdoor terraces, and views of the plaza from Fox News studios. Murdoch was sold.
"Before you get that story, most people suspect that it’s all just follies," Ingels said. "The more blatantly the architect can explain why things are the way they are, the better."
Ingels also counted on a powerful ally in James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. James, then 42, was 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 said. He initially wanted an open, loftlike creative workplace, but after exploring potential sites, he landed at the World Trade Center and chose Ingels. "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 constraint involved Foster’s legacy. As a result of a political compromise, 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, particularly on the lower floors, which had to shift the tower’s immense weight onto preexisting supports.
Days after meeting with Murdoch, Ingels faced severe pushback from engineers. His idea for retrofitting the foundation involved altering walls and columns in the Port Authority’s domain, which proved to be forbidden. Like a Jenga tower, removing that reinforcement threatened the entire structural scheme. Simultaneously, a facade consultant delivered another blow: New York Police Department security standards required all World Trade Center facades to use heavier laminated safety glass, eliminating Ingels’ plan to use thinner, cheaper glass panels to offset costs.
"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."
For weeks, the project’s fate hung in the balance. Silverstein and Murdoch were navigating tense lease negotiations, and any deviation from standard formulas carried steep cost estimates. Yet, after agreeing to painful structural adjustments, Ingels managed to salvage the design’s core identity.
By early June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch took shape, 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, surrounded by executives and a glowing plastic replica of the tower, Ingels demonstrated how his design respected Libeskind’s "Wedge of Light" plaza and solved foundation alignment challenges through diagonal columns.
Libeskind struck the table in approval. "Congratulations, that is a super building," he said, adding with a touch of mischief: "I hope we’re going to see it going up."
Initial reviews following the June 9 unveiling were largely positive, though Libeskind noted that the hardest part remained ahead. "Between that first smile and the last stone is the challenge of architecture," Libeskind observed. "This complex space filled with what the city really is: economics, society, power brokers, politicians."
Despite the hurdles, BIG continued expanding its footprint. In Manhattan alone, Ingels was simultaneously designing four major additions to the Hudson River skyline, a master plan for the Smithsonian’s South Mall campus in Washington, D.C., and the $335 million hybrid park and flood defense system known as the Dryline.
Back at BIG’s new top-floor offices on Broadway, near Wall Street, Ingels welcomed a growing staff of nearly 270 employees across New York and Copenhagen with a midmorning champagne toast, a rendition of Sinatra’s "New York, New York," and a reminder of the scale of their ambitions.
"It’s not every day that you do a 1,200-foot tower in New York City," Ingels quipped. "But it feels like every day."
