On a misty April morning in Lower Manhattan, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels stood high above a cobblestoned street on the roof of an old brick building, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped. The 40-year-old was shooting a promotional film for what would become the defining commission of his young career: his design for the skyscraper known as Two World Trade Center.
At the time, the project remained very much a work in progress, and his primary client—media magnate Rupert Murdoch—had yet to formally sign off. Yet Ingels, hyper-eloquent and brimming with confidence, refused to let doubt stand in the way. Having obsessed over every line and image, he told 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, 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 in 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. Yet Ingels was not overly preoccupied with the past; 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 remarkable gift for storytelling: an ability to construct a compelling narrative around practical necessities. Often, his designs careen 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—envisioned a wildly 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 precocious by the exacting standards of the architecture profession. Yet fame can be a deceptive indicator in his line of work, where an architect’s creations, much like the light of a distant star, only reach 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 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 still had not completed a single skyscraper. With Two World Trade Center, however, he believed he had discovered a way to reinvent the high-rise work environment, transforming a form traditionally defined by vertical hierarchy into a space for horizontal interaction. The difficult part, as always, would be showing that he could translate that captivating story into hard facts on the ground.
Navigating Power and Politics
To realize his design, Ingels had to continually prove its value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Rupert Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the veteran developer who has controlled much of the World Trade Center rebuilding effort. Murdoch and Silverstein still had to agree on a long-term lease that would allow the $4 billion skyscraper to be financed.
"There’s a lot of drama with the deal right now," Ingels remarked on the day of the film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be."
Even if the parties reached an agreement, formidable hazards lay ahead: a volatile real estate market, the unavoidable political melodrama of building on a site of mass trauma, and a notoriously cumbersome bureaucracy in the form of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that owns the underlying land.
For 14 years, these various factors 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 renowned architect Lord Norman Foster. (Turnabout was fair play: Foster had previously pushed aside Ingels on a national library project in Kazakhstan.) To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had to balance the conflicting demands of Murdoch and Silverstein, who intended to market the top half of the building as office space, while simultaneously juggling a wave of new clients who had recently retained his firm, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).
Ingels’ dazzlingly swift rise inspired both awe and envy among his peers. But in architecture, just as a single triumphant building can make a reputation, it takes only one disaster to ruin it. Never short on bravado, Ingels claimed he relished the pressure, describing the ordeal as a "Zen exercise" in turning the force of an adversary into one’s own strength.
Confronting Resistance and Reality
The first major force Ingels had to overcome 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. Silverstein nearly walked away from the deal entirely until endorsements from the architects of other World Trade Center buildings changed his mind.
Shortly after, Ingels faced a high-stakes review with Rupert Murdoch himself. Gathering in a conference room overlooking the site, Ingels was momentarily thrown off balance by the media mogul’s rapid-fire questioning, which he later likened to "kangaroo boxing." Murdoch’s central concern was deceptively simple: 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 arose from positioning the core—which houses the building’s elevators—off-center, creating expansive interior environments for newsrooms, outdoor terraces, and sweeping views of the plaza for Fox News studios. Murdoch was sold.
"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."
Ingels also found a crucial ally in James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent, who had driven the search for a new corporate home for 21st Century Fox and News Corp. Seeking an open, loftlike, creative workplace rather than a traditional corporate tower, James had been drawn to Ingels’ ability to turn constraints into surprising solutions.
However, bridging the gap between Foster’s pre-existing foundation—built to accommodate a $4 billion underground transportation hub—and Ingels’ radical new superstructure proved structurally daunting. During meetings with engineers and consultants, Ingels received a cascade of sobering news: shoring up underground walls within the Port Authority’s domain was prohibited, threatening to unravel the structural scheme. Furthermore, New York Police Department security standards mandated that all facades at the World Trade Center use heavy laminated safety glass to guard against potential explosions, erasing Ingels’ plans for cost-saving thinner materials and driving up the projected facade budget by millions of dollars.
As Silverstein and Murdoch hammered out their complex lease negotiations, deviations from standard formulas were heavily penalized in cost estimates. "Right now," Ingels admitted during the height of the tension, "the architecture is essentially held hostage."
Evolving Through Compromise
Through grueling rounds of negotiations, Ingels agreed to painful structural compromises that preserved the essential character of his design while addressing safety and budgetary concerns. His ability to adapt earned him rare praise from Silverstein executives, who lauded the rapid turnaround.
This philosophy of adaptation lay at the heart of Ingels’ worldview. Rather than viewing setbacks as failures, he embraced an evolutionary perspective, comparing the design process to the natural instincts of fight or flight. In architecture, he maintained, the eureka moment often arrives when an architect abandons a rigid stance and explores new territory.
As BIG continued to expand—taking on massive endeavors such as the Smithsonian South Mall Campus master plan in Washington, DC, the post-Hurricane Sandy coastal protection system known as the Dryline in New York, and various international commissions—Ingels’ unorthodox approach continued to confound traditional expectations. Harvard professor and acclaimed architect Preston Scott Cohen noted that Ingels had effectively bypassed the traditional avant-garde entirely, achieving unprecedented success at a remarkable speed.
Yet, as the revised design for Two World Trade Center was formally unveiled in June 2015, the inherent challenges of the real estate landscape remained evident. Even as fellow master planner Daniel Libeskind praised the tower as a "super building," other figures in the industry voiced reservations. Douglas Durst, operator of the adjacent One World Trade Center, openly criticized the orientation of the stepped gardens, illustrating the constant friction inherent in large-scale urban development.
For Ingels, the journey underscored a fundamental truth of his profession: an architect must navigate a complex ecosystem of economics, power brokers, and politicians. Sitting in his newly expanded Manhattan office overlooking the very skyline he was striving to reshape, Ingels reflected on the sheer improbability of realizing such ambitious visions.
"Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit," Ingels said, framing an empty stretch of the downtown landscape with his hands. "I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
