On a misty April morning, 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 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 imperious media magnate Rupert Murdoch—had yet to definitively sign off. Yet the hyper-eloquent 40-year-old architect 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 corporate empire was still one of New York real estate’s best-kept 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, 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 was designed 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 replicating the somber mood of the site; he wanted to make his own history. "The memorial is about the memorial," he 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 a rare gift for storytelling: an ability to construct a compelling narrative around practical necessities.
Often, his designs careen in fantastical directions. He oversaw the construction of a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen featuring a slanted roof that doubles as a recreational ski slope, complete with a smokestack designed 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—along with collaborator Thomas Heatherwick—created a wildly elaborate complex of geodesic domes, envisioning a sustainable lifestyle of biking, hiking, and coding beneath a sunlit glass terrarium.
Such imaginative flights have made Ingels famous, and highly sought-after, at an age considered precocious by traditional architecture standards. But fame can be a deceptive indicator in his profession, 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 project to date at the time, a striking pyramidal apartment building under construction along Manhattan’s West Side Highway at 57th Street, stood at 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, Ingels believed he had devised a way to create a radically new kind of high-rise work environment—one that transformed a form traditionally defined by verticality and hierarchy into a hub for horizontal interaction. But first came the laborious, high-stakes task of proving he was capable of turning that captivating story into hard facts on the ground.
Playfully calling his firm BIG, Ingels practiced an approach he dubbed "BIGamy." Rather than adhering to a single rigid aesthetic, he tailored his ideas to meet specific client demands, all in service of designs unlike anything seen before.
Navigating Power and Politics
To realize his design, Ingels continually had to prove its value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Rupert Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the developer who controlled much of the World Trade Center rebuilding effort. Murdoch and Silverstein had to agree on a complex, long-term lease before the $4 billion skyscraper could secure financing.
"There’s a lot of drama with the deal right now," Ingels said on the day of his film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be." Even if the parties came to an agreement, formidable hazards remained: a volatile real estate market, the unavoidable political melodrama inherent in building on a scene of mass murder, and an often inflexible government bureaucracy embodied by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
For 14 years, these conflicting forces had conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, dashing many architectural ambitions along the way. In fact, Ingels’ design directly displaced an earlier proposal by Lord Norman Foster. (Turnabout was fair play, as Foster had previously pushed aside 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, who planned to market the top half of the building as premium office space. At the same time, he was juggling a cascade of other international clients who had recently showered business on his rapidly expanding firm.
The first major force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center was institutional inertia. Silverstein was initially content with Foster’s existing design and harbored serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings, fearing the stacked structure would look asymmetrical or even teetering from certain angles. Silverstein nearly rejected the entire deal before an endorsement from the architects of the other World Trade Center buildings shifted his perspective.
The following Monday, the principals gathered in a conference room overlooking the site. Ingels found himself knocked off balance by Murdoch’s rapid-fire questioning, which he later likened to "kangaroo boxing." Murdoch’s primary concern boiled down to a fundamental question: Why doesn’t it fall over?
With assistance from David Childs, the architect behind One World Trade Center, Ingels explained that the leaning effect was an illusion. The unorthodox stepped form of the building resulted from placing the structural core—which houses elevators—in an off-center position. This ingenious layout created expansive interior workspaces for newsrooms, sweeping views of the Trade Center plaza for Fox News studios, and sprawling outdoor terraces. Murdoch was convinced.
"Before you get that story, most people suspect that it’s all just follies," Ingels reflected. "The more blatantly the architect can explain why things are the way they are, the better."
In his efforts, Ingels counted on a vital ally: James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. It was the younger Murdoch who spearheaded the search to relocate 21st Century Fox and News Corp. from their aging headquarters near Rockefeller Center. "We sort of thought, ‘Let’s not hire a starchitect, let’s not build a big tower,’" James recalled, noting he originally wanted an open, loftlike creative workplace. Yet after exploring multiple sites, they arrived at the World Trade Center—and partnered with Ingels, a star who understood their vision. "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."
Engineering Realities and Cost Pressures
The foremost physical constraint involved the remnants of Foster’s previous design. As a result of a political compromise between Silverstein and the Port Authority, Foster’s foundation had already been constructed to anchor a $4 billion underground transportation hub. Piggybacking a completely new skyscraper onto an existing foundation created intricate structural hurdles, particularly in the lobby and lower floors, which had to be engineered to transfer the tower’s immense weight onto preexisting supports.
Ten days after his meeting with Murdoch, Ingels returned to BIG’s offices just as the firm was preparing to move into a larger space. Standing at a whiteboard, Ingels explained the physics of his design. "A lot of towers, as they get over a certain height, tend toward a square footprint," he noted, pointing out that generic forms are dictated by cost, marketing, and the need to withstand immense gravity and wind forces. "We just redistributed the calories," he said of his unique massing.
Those calculations soon met harsh realities. Ute Rinnebach, Ingels’ project manager for Two World Trade Center, returned from a meeting with the structural engineers bearing discouraging news: Ingels’ plan to retrofit the underground foundation by shoring up walls and columns conflicted with Port Authority regulations. Removing critical reinforcement risked destabilizing the entire structural scheme. Simultaneously, a facade consultant delivered another blow. Ingels had hoped to use thinner glass panels to offset costs, but New York Police Department security standards mandated that all facades at the World Trade Center utilize heavy, laminated safety glass to protect against potential explosions.
With construction-cost estimates climbing, Silverstein and Murdoch reached a tense juncture in their negotiations. "Right now," Ingels conceded, "the architecture is essentially held hostage."
Despite weeks of uncertainty, Ingels managed to avert disaster by agreeing to critical structural adjustments while preserving the core design. His diplomatic efforts earned praise from key stakeholders, including Janno Lieber, Silverstein’s second-in-command, who offered a congratulatory embrace for steering the project through its turbulence.
A Global Footprint and Continuing Ambitions
As BIG expanded across the globe, Ingels balanced high-profile international assignments—from the Smithsonian South Mall master plan in Washington, D.C., to a $335 million hybrid park and flood defense system known as the Dryline in New York—with the ongoing realities of corporate architecture.
Reflecting on his meteoric rise, Harvard Graduate School of Design professor and architect 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."
Unlike modernist pioneers who prioritized uniform, utilitarian boxes, Ingels sought to infuse large-scale commercial projects with artistic ambition. Whether finalizing the unique cascading apartments of Via 57 West with developer Douglas Durst or refining the intricate details of Two World Trade Center alongside Silverstein and the Murdochs, Ingels continued to embrace the complex interplay of economics, politics, and design.
"Architecture is the art and science of trying to make everybody happy," Ingels reflected. "Potentially, somewhere out there, there’s a design that can actually satisfy every dream, by being different."
