On a misty April morning, 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 Danish architect was shooting a promotional film for the most important commission of his young career: his revolutionary design for the skyscraper known as Two World Trade Center.
At the time, the project remained a work in progress, and his primary client—media magnate Rupert Murdoch—had yet to officially sign off. 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, telling his director that he wanted viewers to swoon. At that moment, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his media empire was still one of New York real estate’s best-kept secrets, but Ingels could hardly contain his excitement.
Between takes, Ingels pointed toward a void in the densely packed Manhattan skyline, tracing the profile of a skyscraper that only he could see. From his perspective, 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 reflected. "Out of many, one."
If completed, the tower is slated to 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 architectural ensemble rings two cascading pools that pay tribute to the roughly 3,000 people who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Yet Ingels maintained that his focus was firmly on the future. "The memorial is about the memorial," he noted. "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." He boasts many talents—as a draftsman, a salesman, and the charming cultivator of his own winning public image—but his greatest asset is an innate gift for storytelling: an ability to construct a compelling narrative around practical necessities.
Often, his designs veer 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, Ingels—collaborating with British designer Thomas Heatherwick—conceived 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 the standards of his profession. Yet fame can be a deceptive indicator in architecture, where an architect’s work, much like the light of a distant star, only reaches the public eye after a years-long journey.
Ingels’ largest completed project to date at the time, a striking pyramidal apartment building along Manhattan’s West Side Highway known as 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 had yet to complete a full-scale skyscraper.
With Two World Trade Center, Ingels believed he had found a way to pioneer a new kind of high-rise work environment, transforming a form that is traditionally vertical and hierarchical into a space that encourages horizontal interaction. But first came the laborious process of translating that captivating narrative into reality.
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 who has controlled 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 during his film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be."
Even if the parties reached an agreement, numerous other hazards loomed: a volatile real estate market, the political melodrama inherent in building on a site of mass tragedy, and the bureaucratic hurdles posed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency that owns the underlying land.
For 14 years, these factors had conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, derailing many architectural ambitions. In fact, Ingels’ design directly displaced an earlier proposal by Lord Norman Foster. To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had to balance the sometimes conflicting demands of Murdoch and Silverstein, who planned to market the upper half of the building as office space, while juggling the many other high-profile clients vying for the attention of his firm, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).
Navigating Power and Politics
The first major hurdle Ingels faced at the World Trade Center was institutional inertia. Silverstein initially favored Foster’s design and harbored serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings, fearing the stacked structure would appear asymmetrical or precarious 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 proposal entirely before receiving endorsements from the architects behind other World Trade Center buildings. Shortly after, Ingels learned that Rupert Murdoch himself wanted to review the latest iterations of the design.
During a meeting in a conference room overlooking the site, Ingels found himself fielding rapid-fire questions from the combative media mogul. "It’s almost sort of like kangaroo boxing," Ingels remarked later.
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 building’s inner core—which houses the elevators—off-center, creating expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, outdoor terraces, and direct views of the plaza from Fox News studios. The explanation won Murdoch over.
"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 found a vital 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, creative workspace rather than a traditional corporate tower.
"We were struck by what a great problem solver he was," James Murdoch said. "This is someone who can take a set of constraints and create something surprising and effective out of them."
The Engineering Realities
Working within the physical remnants of Foster’s original foundation—constructed to accommodate an underground transportation hub—created profound structural challenges. Ingels dismissed Foster’s previous design as "a generic extrusion with a flashy hat," but adapting a new tower to preexisting underground supports demanded complex engineering solutions.
Shortly after winning over Murdoch and Silverstein, Ingels encountered resistance from engineers who warned that modifying the foundation walls within the Port Authority’s jurisdiction could destabilize the entire structural scheme. Furthermore, security standards enforced by the New York Police Department required all facades at the World Trade Center to be built with heavy laminated safety glass to withstand potential explosions, driving up projected material 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."
As negotiations between Silverstein and Murdoch grew tense, any departure from standard architectural formulas threatened to inflate construction cost estimates. For several weeks, the project’s fate remained uncertain. Yet, after accepting necessary structural modifications—including adjustments to the massing and straightening columns to cut costs—Ingels managed to keep the core design intact.
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 told Ingels. "That was a helluva turnaround that you guys did in the last week."
Expanding Ambitions
As BIG expanded its global footprint, taking on projects ranging from a master plan for the Smithsonian Institution’s South Mall campus in Washington, D.C., to the "Dryline" flood defense system along Manhattan’s waterfront, Ingels continued to challenge traditional boundaries between utilitarian corporate architecture and visionary design.
Reflecting on his rapid ascent, Preston Scott Cohen, an architect and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, noted, "He has just bypassed all the rest of the avant-garde. No one has done it that fast, with that degree of success. You name them, he has just flown right over their heads."
Despite occasional setbacks, such as mountain view development limits in California or ongoing negotiations at the World Trade Center, Ingels remained steadfast in his pragmatic yet utopian philosophy. Returning to his firm’s new offices overlooking Broadway and the Manhattan skyline, Ingels celebrated another milestone with his growing team of international architects.
With tentative agreements in place and initial design approvals secured from figures like master planner Daniel Libeskind, Ingels prepared for the next phase of development. For an architect who views his profession as the art of turning fiction into fact, the challenge remained fixed on navigating the complex intersection of economics, politics, and human ambition to bring his grandest visions to life.
