On a misty April morning, Bjarke Ingels stood on the roof of a historic brick building high above the cobblestoned streets of Lower Manhattan, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped. The 40-year-old 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 was still very much a work in progress, and his primary client—the formidable media magnate Rupert Murdoch—had yet to formally sign off. Yet the hyper-eloquent Ingels did not 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 this moment, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his corporate empire was still one of New York real estate’s best-kept secrets. But Ingels could hardly wait to shout the news, quite literally, from the rooftops.
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 this perspective, his 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 would stand among the tallest buildings in New York City and serve as the final piece of the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center site. The ensemble of towers would ring two cascading pools paying tribute to the roughly 3,000 people who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But Ingels was not overly preoccupied with the tragedy of the past; he wanted to forge his own history for the living city.
"The memorial is about the memorial," Ingels noted. "The tower should be about the living city."
Eclecticism on Demand
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 an uncanny gift for storytelling: an ability to weave a compelling narrative around cold, practical necessities. Frequently, his designs careen in wildly fantastical directions.
At the time, he was actively building a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen featuring a slanted roof designed to double as a recreational ski slope, complete with a smokestack engineered 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—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. As Ingels well knew, an architect’s work, much like the light of a distant star, only reaches the public eye after a years-long, arduous journey.
His largest completed project in the United States at the time—a striking pyramidal apartment building rising along Manhattan’s West Side Highway at 57th Street—was roughly one-third the scale 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, adding with characteristic humility, "we still haven’t completed a skyscraper."
With Two World Trade Center, Ingels believed he had figured out how to create an entirely new kind of high-rise work environment—one that transformed a form traditionally defined by verticality and hierarchy into a landscape for horizontal interaction. Next came the laborious part: proving he could translate that captivating narrative into hard facts on the ground.
To realize his design, Ingels had to continually prove its practical value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Rupert Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the developer who had controlled much of the World Trade Center rebuilding effort. Murdoch and Silverstein still needed to finalize a long-term lease agreement that would allow the $4 billion skyscraper to secure financing.
"There’s a lot of drama with the deal right now," Ingels remarked on the day of his promotional shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be."
Even if the parties reached an accord, formidable hazards remained: a volatile real estate market, the unavoidable political melodrama of building on a site of mass trauma, and a notoriously lumbering bureaucracy in the form of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that owned the underlying land.
For 14 years, these very factors had conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching forward unpredictably, crushing many architectural ambitions along the way. In fact, Ingels’s design had directly displaced an earlier concept by renowned architect Lord Norman Foster. (Turnabout is fair play; Foster had previously pushed aside Ingels on a library project in Kazakhstan.) To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had to balance the competing demands of Murdoch and Silverstein, who planned to market the upper half of the tower as premium office space. At the same time, he had to manage a flood of new clients keeping his firm—playfully named BIG, for Bjarke Ingels Group—exhaustively busy.
Navigating Power and Resistance
The first major force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center site was sheer inertia. Silverstein initially believed he had a perfectly functioning design from Foster and harbored deep reservations about Ingels’s unconventional early sketches. He worried the stacked structure would appear 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 walked away from the entire arrangement before an endorsement from the architects of the other World Trade Center buildings helped change his mind. Yet on the day of the rooftop shoot, Ingels received word that Rupert Murdoch wanted to review the latest iteration of the design in person.
The following Monday, the principals gathered in a conference room overlooking the ground zero site. Ingels, usually unflappable, found himself momentarily knocked off balance by the Australian media tycoon’s rapid-fire questioning.
"It’s almost sort of like kangaroo boxing," Ingels said hours later back at his office.
Murdoch’s central concern boiled down to a fundamental question: Why doesn’t it fall over? With assistance from David Childs, the courtly architect of One World Trade Center, Ingels explained that the leaning effect was purely an optical illusion. The unorthodox stepped geometry of the building was the result of placing the inner core—which houses the elevators—in an off-center position. This layout created expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, sweeping outdoor terraces, and prime views of the plaza for Fox News studios. Murdoch was ultimately 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 drove the decision to relocate 21st Century Fox and News Corp. from an aging property near Rockefeller Center.
"It was funny," James Murdoch recalled. "We sort of thought, ‘Let’s not hire a starchitect, let’s not build a big tower.’"
He initially wanted an open, loftlike, creative workspace. Yet after an exhaustive search, he arrived at the World Trade Center site—and partnered with Ingels, a star who understood his operational 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."
The Engineering Reality Check
The foremost constraint involved Foster’s legacy—specifically, the foundations of his unbuilt design. As part 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 slated to rise once an anchor tenant was locked in.
Neither James Murdoch nor Ingels felt Foster’s conservative skyscraper suited a modern media company. Ingels dismissed the prior design as "a generic extrusion with a flashy hat."
However, grafting a brand-new skyscraper onto Foster’s pre-existing foundation presented immense structural hurdles, particularly in the lobby and lower floors, which had to transfer the building’s massive weight onto old supports. Whatever Ingels envisioned in the sky had to align with what was anchored deep in the earth.
Ten days after meeting with Murdoch, Ingels stood in his Tribeca office using a whiteboard to explain the physics of his design.
"A lot of towers, as they get over a certain height, they tend toward a square footprint," he said, noting that uniform floor plates are favored for cost and leasing efficiency. But Ingels believed he could break the mold. "We just redistributed the calories," he quipped.
Moments later, Ute Rinnebach, the project manager for Two World Trade Center, rushed back into the office from a meeting with the engineering team.
"How did it go?" Ingels asked.
"Really bad," Rinnebach replied. "I’ve got some horrible news for you."
Ingels’s plan to retrofit the foundation involved reinforcing underground walls and columns within the Port Authority’s jurisdiction—a proposition that was strictly forbidden. Removing that crucial bit of reinforcement, like pulling a block from a Jenga tower, threatened the entire structural scheme.
Worse still, a facade consultant delivered another blow. Ingels had planned to vary the alignment of the glass panes and metal mullions to cut costs, estimating a savings over Foster’s design. However, New York Police Department security standards mandated that all facades at the World Trade Center complex utilize heavy laminated safety glass to protect against 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."
With Silverstein and Murdoch locked in tense lease negotiations, any departure from standard construction formulas was heavily penalized in cost estimates.
"Right now," Ingels admitted, "the architecture is essentially held hostage."
For weeks, the project’s fate hung in the balance. Yet as negotiations progressed, Ingels agreed to painful structural modifications that preserved the core identity of the design. Walking across the World Trade Center plaza one afternoon, he ran into Janno Lieber, Silverstein’s second-in-command, who offered unexpected praise.
"I gotta tell you, I gotta give you a hug," Lieber said, praising the turnaround the design team had engineered. "That was a helluva turnaround that you guys did in the last week."
"Suddenly, the sum of a lot of nudges adds up," Ingels replied.
Evolution and Expansion
Reflecting on the turbulent process, Ingels leaned into evolutionary metaphors. 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. While fame and powerful clients had improved those odds, setbacks remained inevitable. Even tech giant Google recently faced a reality check when the city of Mountain View denied development rights for parts of their sprawling campus master plan.
Yet BIG’s pipeline continued to overflow. In Manhattan alone, Ingels was simultaneously designing four major additions to the Hudson River skyline alongside the Dryline, a $335 million hybrid park and flood defense system along the East River. In Washington, DC, his firm was reimagining the master plan for the Smithsonian’s South Mall campus.
Reflecting on his rapid ascent since founding BIG in Copenhagen just a decade prior, Harvard Graduate School of Design professor Preston Scott Cohen noted, "He has just bypassed all the rest of the avant-garde. No one has done it that fast, with that degree of success."
By early June, a tentative agreement between Silverstein and Murdoch was finalized, paving the way for the public unveiling of Two World Trade Center. Before the announcement, however, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the architect behind the overall World Trade Center master plan.
During a presentation at BIG’s offices, Ingels showed how his design respected Libeskind’s Wedge of Light plaza and resolved foundation constraints through a network of sloping columns. Libeskind slapped the table in approval.
"Congratulations, that is a super building," Libeskind said, adding with a touch of mischief, "I hope we’re going to see it going up."
Initial public reviews were largely positive, but Libeskind offered a pragmatic warning about the road ahead. "Between that first smile and the last stone is the challenge of architecture," he noted, pointing to the complex interplay of economics, social forces, and politics in New York City.
Indeed, challenges persisted. The tower’s height shrunk slightly during ongoing design tweaks, and the project even acquired an unexpected critic in Douglas Durst, who operated One World Trade Center next door.
"I’m very disappointed in Bjarke’s design," Durst said, criticizing the orientation of the stepped gardens. "He turned his back on our building. Not even metaphorically. It’s very disrespectful."
Despite his critique, Durst maintained that Ingels was a genius—illustrating the delicate tightrope successful architects must walk as they scale their practices.
Back at BIG’s newly expanded Broadway offices near Wall Street, a celebratory champagne toast marked the firm’s growth to 170 employees in New York and 100 in Copenhagen. Surrounded by a young, international staff, Ingels reflected on the sheer scale of their ambitions.
"It’s not every day that you do a 1,200-foot tower in New York City," he quipped to his team. "But it feels like every day."
For Ingels, the journey remained an exercise in solving grand equations with multiple fixed and shifting variables. Stepping out onto the sunny Manhattan streets near the World Trade Center, he framed a view with his hands and smiled at the empty space where his tower would eventually rise.
"Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit," Ingels said. "I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
