On a misty April day, Bjarke Ingels stood on the roof of an old brick building high above a cobblestoned street in Lower Manhattan, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped. The Danish architect was shooting a promotional film about the most important commission of his young career: his design for the skyscraper known as Two World Trade Center. Still a work in progress, his primary client—the imperious media magnate Rupert Murdoch—had yet to formally sign off. Yet the hyper-eloquent 40-year-old did not let doubt stand in the way of his video introduction. He had obsessed over every line and image, telling his director that he wanted viewers to swoon. At this moment, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his companies was still one of New York real estate’s biggest secrets, but Ingels could not wait 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, serving as the final piece of the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center site. The ensemble was envisioned to ring two cascading pools paying tribute to the roughly 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But Ingels was not preoccupied with that somber history; he wanted to make his own mark. "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 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. At the time, he was building a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen with a slanted roof that served as a recreational ski slope, complete with a smokestack designed to puff a symbolic ring of steam each time it emitted 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 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 completed up to that point, a striking pyramidal apartment building 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. "We still haven’t completed a skyscraper." With Two World Trade Center, Ingels 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. Now came the laborious part: showing 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 adhere to a single aesthetic, he tailors his ideas to meet client demands, all in service of designs unlike anything seen before.
To realize his design, however, Ingels had to continually prove its value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the developer who controlled much of the World Trade Center rebuilding. Murdoch and Silverstein still had to agree on a long-term lease, which would allow the $4 billion skyscraper to be financed.
"There’s a lot of drama with the deal right now," Ingels said the day of the film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be." Even if the parties came to an agreement, there were other hazards to navigate: a volatile real estate market, the political melodrama inherent in building on a scene of mass murder, and an often irrational government embodied by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the lumbering transportation agency owning the land beneath the Trade Center buildings.
For 14 years, these factors conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, leveling many an architectural ambition. Ingels’ design had displaced an earlier one by Lord Norman Foster. To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had to balance the sometimes conflicting demands of Murdoch and Silverstein, who would be marketing the top half of the building as office space, while juggling other major clients who had recently showered business on his firm. Ingels’ dazzlingly swift rise inspired awe and envy among his peers, but in architecture, it takes only one disaster to ruin a reputation. Ingels, never short on bravado, said he relished the pressure. "It is like this Zen exercise," he remarked. "Turning the force of your enemy into your own strength."
The first force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center was inertia. Silverstein thought he had a perfectly good design from Foster and harbored serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings, fearing the stacked structure would look asymmetrical and teetering from certain perspectives. Silverstein almost rejected the entire deal until an endorsement from the architects of other World Trade Center buildings changed his mind.
The following Monday, the principals gathered in a conference room overlooking the site. Ingels was knocked off balance by the combative Australian media mogul’s rapid-fire questioning. "It’s almost sort of like kangaroo boxing," Ingels said hours afterward. Murdoch’s deepest concern amounted to a simple 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 resulted from placing the inner core—which houses crucial elevators—in an off-center position, producing expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, views of the plaza from Fox News studios, and outdoor terraces. Murdoch was sold.
Ingels also counted on a powerful ally in James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. It was James who drove the process of deciding whether to relocate his father’s companies, 21st Century Fox and News Corp., from an aging building near Rockefeller Center. Looking for an open, loftlike, creative workplace, James and his team ultimately landed at the World Trade Center and with Ingels. "We were struck by what a great problem solver he was," James noted. "This is someone who can take a set of constraints and create something surprising and effective out of them."
The foremost constraint involved the remnants of Foster’s design. As a result of a political compromise between Silverstein and the Port Authority, Foster’s foundation had already been constructed to allow the completion of a $4 billion underground transportation hub. Piggybacking a new skyscraper onto Foster’s foundation created tricky structural problems, especially on the lower floors, which had to be engineered to shift the tower’s weight onto preexisting supports.
Ten days after his meeting with Murdoch, Ingels was back at BIG’s offices, drawing on a whiteboard to explain the engineering challenges. A skyscraper must withstand huge forces of gravity and wind, typically relying on a square footprint for cost, marketing, and engineering reasons. But Ingels believed he could shape his skyscraper differently. "We just redistributed the calories," he said.
Trouble soon arrived when project manager Ute Rinnebach returned from meeting with engineers to deliver bad news: Ingels’ idea for retrofitting the foundation by shoring up walls and columns underground in the Port Authority’s domain was forbidden. Removing that reinforcement could cause the structural scheme to fail. Furthermore, a facade consultant brought more disappointing news. Ingels had planned to use a thinner product for parts of the building to reduce facade costs, but New York Police Department security standards required all facades at the World Trade Center to be laminated safety glass, making them heavier and more expensive.
"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 a few weeks, the fate of the project hung in the balance. Silverstein and Murdoch were navigating a tense juncture in bargaining, and any departure from traditional formulas was heavily penalized in construction-cost estimates. Yet Ingels managed to avert disaster by agreeing to a number of painful structural changes. Walking across the World Trade Center plaza later, he encountered Silverstein’s second-in-command, Janno Lieber, who offered encouragement: "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, and the parties were confident enough to publicly unveil the design for Two World Trade Center. First, however, Ingels had to seek a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the architect who laid out the master plan for the complex. Libeskind provided a cautionary example, having experienced his own clashes with Silverstein a decade prior.
During a presentation in BIG’s conference room, Ingels showed how his building respected Libeskind’s Wedge of Light plaza and solved foundation alignment challenges through diagonal columns. Libeskind gave his approval with a slap on the table: "Congratulations, that is a super building."
Initial reviews following the June 9 unveiling were mainly positive, but as Libeskind noted, that was the easy part. The tower’s design continued to experience minor adjustments, including fluctuations in height and critique from nearby developers like Douglas Durst, who operated One World Trade Center next door. Nevertheless, BIG continued to expand its footprint in New York and globally, taking on massive hybrid urban projects such as the Dryline flood defense system along the East River and a master plan for the Smithsonian’s South Mall campus in Washington, DC.
Reflecting on his rapid ascent, Ingels remained philosophical about the realities of his profession. "A lot of the starchitects have started their careers doing some high-end sculptural projects," he noted. "When they suddenly get faced with something that is more governed by the parameters of the practical, they end up almost petrified or paralyzed, because their usual repertoire doesn’t work."
For Ingels, the challenge of realizing ambitious architecture remained an exercise in solving gigantic equations with multiple variables. Standing near the World Trade Center site, looking toward where his tower would eventually rise, he captured his characteristic optimism: "Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit. I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
