On a misty April morning in Lower Manhattan, Bjarke Ingels stood atop an old brick building with the collar of his black coat rakishly popped, shooting a promotional film for what would become the most pivotal commission of his career. The Danish architect was mapping out his design for Two World Trade Center, a staggering high-rise still very much in the realm of theory. His primary client, media magnate Rupert Murdoch, had yet to fully sign off on the multi-billion-dollar relocation plan, and the finer points of the development remained one of New York real estate’s most carefully guarded secrets. Yet, the 40-year-old architect refused to let doubt slow him down. Obsessing over every line and image, Ingels told his director he wanted viewers to swoon. Between takes, he pointed to a void in the densely packed Manhattan skyline, tracing the profile of a skyscraper that, at that moment, existed almost entirely in his imagination.
From his vantage point, Ingels’ 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 and mark the final piece of the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center site. The ensemble would ultimately ring two cascading pools paying tribute to the nearly 3,000 people who lost their lives on September 11, 2001. But Ingels was not focused on looking backward; he wanted to make his own history. "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 a rare suite of talents—as a draftsman, a salesman, and a charming cultivator of his own winning image—but his greatest asset is a profound gift for storytelling. He builds elaborate narratives around practical necessities, often pushing his designs 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 every time it emits a ton of carbon dioxide. For a proposed expansion of Google’s campus in Mountain View, California, Ingels collaborated with designer Thomas Heatherwick on an elaborate complex of geodesic domes, envisioning a lifestyle of biking, hiking, and coding beneath sunlit glass terrariums.
Such imaginative flights have made Ingels an international celebrity and a highly sought-after name 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, often reaches the eye only after a years-long journey. Ingels’ largest project to date at the time—a striking pyramidal apartment building 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, "we still haven’t completed a skyscraper." With Two World Trade Center, he believed he had devised a way to reinvent the high-rise work environment, transforming a form that is fundamentally vertical and hierarchical into a hub for horizontal interaction. Now came the laborious part: proving he could turn that captivating story into hard facts on the ground.
Eclecticism on Demand
Ingels playfully refers to his firm as BIG, and his approach to architecture as "BIGamy." Rather than adhering to a single, unyielding aesthetic, he tailors his ideas to meet the specific demands of his clients, all in service of designs unlike anything seen before.
To realize his design, however, Ingels continually had to 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 had to agree on a long-term lease to make the financing of the $4 billion skyscraper viable. "There’s a lot of drama with the deal right now," Ingels remarked on the day of his film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be." Even with an agreement, formidable hazards loomed: a volatile real estate market, the political melodrama inherent in building on a site of mass tragedy, and the notoriously lumbering Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency that owns the land beneath the towers.
For 14 years, these very factors had conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching forward unpredictably, crushing many ambitious architectural visions. In fact, Ingels’ design had displaced an earlier one by Lord Norman Foster—though turnabout was fair play, as Foster had previously edged out Ingels on a national library project in Kazakhstan. To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had to balance the competing demands of Murdoch and Silverstein while juggling a slew of other high-profile clients who had recently flooded BIG with commissions. The swiftness of his rise inspired both awe and envy among his peers, serving as a reminder that while one triumphant building can make a reputation, it takes only one disaster to ruin it.
The first force Ingels had to conquer at the World Trade Center was institutional inertia. Silverstein initially believed he had a perfectly good design from Foster and harbored serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings, fearing the stacked structure would look asymmetrical or even teetering from certain angles. He nearly rejected the entire deal until receiving endorsements from the architects behind other World Trade Center buildings. Soon after, Ingels learned that Rupert Murdoch wanted to review the latest iteration of the design himself.
The following Monday, the principals gathered in a conference room overlooking the site. Unflappable by nature, Ingels found himself momentarily thrown off balance by the combative Australian media mogul’s rapid-fire questioning, likening the experience to "kangaroo boxing." Murdoch’s chief anxiety centered on structural stability: why wouldn’t the building fall over? Assisted by 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 shifting the inner core—which houses elevators—off-center, creating expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, outdoor terraces, and prime views of the plaza from Fox News studios. Murdoch was 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 crucial 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 initially toyed with a modest approach. "We sort of thought, ‘Let’s not hire a starchitect, let’s not build a big tower,’" James recalled. He wanted an open, loftlike workspace, but after exploring various sites, he arrived at the World Trade Center and chose Ingels, a star who understood his practical desires. "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."
Yet major hurdles remained. The primary constraint involved the remnants of Foster’s previous design. Due to a political compromise between Silverstein and the Port Authority, Foster’s foundation had already been constructed to accommodate a $4 underground transportation hub. Piggybacking a brand-new skyscraper onto an existing foundation created complex structural challenges, particularly in the lobby and lower floors, which had to transfer the new tower’s immense weight onto preexisting supports.
Days after meeting with Murdoch, Ingels faced a harsh reality check when his project manager returned from a meeting with engineers. Altering the foundation walls and columns within the Port Authority’s domain was forbidden; removing crucial reinforcements risked destabilizing the entire structural scheme. Furthermore, a facade consultant delivered another blow: New York Police Department security standards mandated that all facades at the World Trade Center use heavy laminated safety glass to withstand potential explosions, rendering Ingels’ plans for cost-saving, thinner materials impossible. With Silverstein and Murdoch locked in tense lease negotiations, any departure from standard construction formulas came at a premium. "Right now," Ingels admitted, "the architecture is essentially held hostage."
Despite weeks of uncertainty and painful structural compromises, Ingels managed to salvage the design’s core identity. Walking through the World Trade Center plaza with Silverstein executives, he received enthusiastic praise from Janno Lieber, Silverstein’s second-in-command, who lauded the team’s rapid turnaround. Ingels leaned into his philosophical view of architectural evolution: "In Darwinian evolution, the animal has two primary instincts… fight or flight. 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."
That evolutionary metaphor speaks to an enduring truth: architects must live with continual defeats. In his 2009 manifesto, Yes Is More, Ingels estimated that of 200 designs produced in his first eight years, only 11 were built. While fame and high-paying clients like Google have improved those odds, even tech giants face setbacks, such as when the city of Mountain View denied development rights for a portion of Google’s massive campus complex.
Still, BIG’s pipeline continued to overflow. In Manhattan alone, Ingels was simultaneously designing four major skyline additions and a $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’s South Mall campus. Such high-profile commissions cemented a rocketing trajectory that left academic peers astonished. "He has just bypassed all the rest of the avant-garde," noted 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."
By early June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch allowed the public unveiling of Two World Trade Center. Before the announcement, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the master planner of the site whose own early hopes for designing One World Trade Center had been dashed by political and development realities. Gathered in BIG’s conference room around a glowing scale model, Libeskind inspected how Ingels’ diagonal lobby columns respected the master plan’s "Wedge of Light" feature. Libeskind offered a resounding endorsement, giving the table a hearty slap and declaring, "Congratulations, that is a super building."
Yet, as Libeskind noted, the presentation was the easy part. Turning a model into reality required navigating the complex friction of economics, politics, and power. The tower’s design remained in flux, fluctuating in height and drawing a sharp critique from Douglas Durst, operator of the adjacent One World Trade Center, who complained that the stepped gardens turned their back on his building.
As BIG expanded to hundreds of employees across New York and Copenhagen, Ingels increasingly delegated authority while remaining deeply hands-on, rushing from concrete samples to client pitches for waterfront pavilions. By mid-summer, a tentative lease agreement between Silverstein and Murdoch brought the project closer to realization, even as cost considerations continued to force compromises on lobby aesthetics and structural details.
Reflecting on his journey, Ingels remained philosophical about the pragmatic boundaries of his profession. Rejecting the notion that architects must remain tethered to a single aesthetic, he viewed his work as solving a gigantic equation with multiple fixed and shifting variables. Standing near the World Trade Center site, framing a mental picture of where his tower would soon rise, Ingels smiled and remarked, "Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit. I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
