By Andrew Rice
On a misty April day, Bjarke Ingels stands 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 is shooting a promotional film for what is undoubtedly the most important commission of his young career: his design for the skyscraper known as Two World Trade Center.
It is still very much a work in progress, and his primary client—the imperious media magnate Rupert Murdoch—has yet to formally sign off. The hyper-eloquent 40-year-old architect is not letting doubt stand in the way of his video introduction, however. He has obsessed over every line and image, telling his director that he wants viewers to swoon. At this moment, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his corporate empire is still one of New York real estate’s biggest secrets, but Ingels can hardly wait to shout the news, quite literally, from the rooftops.
Between takes, Ingels points to a void in the densely packed Manhattan skyline, tracing the profile of a skyscraper that only he can see. From this perspective, Ingels’ design resembles 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 says. "Out of many, one."
If completed, the tower will stand among the tallest buildings in New York City and serve as the final structure envisioned in the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center. The grand ensemble will ring two cascading pools that pay tribute to the roughly 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Yet Ingels is not preoccupied with that somber history; he wants to make his own.
"The memorial is about the memorial," he tells me. "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, as a salesman, and as the charming cultivator of his own winning image—but his greatest asset is a rare gift for storytelling: an ability to construct an intricate narrative around mundane practical necessities.
Often, his designs careen in fantastical directions. He is currently building a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen featuring a slanted roof that doubles as a recreational ski slope and 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 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. But fame can be a deceptive indicator in his profession, where an architect’s work, much like the light of a star, only reaches the human eye after a years-long journey.
Ingels’ largest project to date, a striking pyramidal apartment building under construction along Manhattan’s West Side Highway at 57th Street, is 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 acknowledges, noting, "we still haven’t completed a skyscraper."
With Two World Trade Center, Ingels believes he has imagined a way to create an entirely new kind of high-rise work environment, one that transforms a structural form that is fundamentally vertical and hierarchical into a place for horizontal interaction. Now comes the laborious part: showing that he is capable of transforming that captivating story into hard facts on the ground.
Playfully calling his firm BIG, Ingels approaches his profession with a philosophy he jokingly terms "BIGamy." Rather than adhering to a single, rigid aesthetic, he tailors his ideas to meet demanding client specifications—all in service of designs unlike anything seen before.
Navigating Power and Politics
To realize his design, Ingels has had to continually prove its value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the developer who has controlled much of the World Trade Center rebuilding effort. Murdoch and Silverstein still had to agree on a long-term lease, a crucial agreement that would allow the $4 billion skyscraper to be financed.
"There’s a lot of drama with the deal right now," Ingels says on the day of the film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be."
Even if the parties come to an agreement, there are plenty of 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 bureaucracy embodied by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the lumbering transportation agency that owns the land beneath the Trade Center complex.
For 14 years, these factors have conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, leveling many an architectural ambition along the way. Ingels’ design actually displaced an earlier concept by Lord Norman Foster. (Turnabout is fair play, as Foster had similarly pushed aside Ingels on a previous project, a national library in Kazakhstan.)
To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels must balance the sometimes conflicting demands of Murdoch and Silverstein, who will be marketing the top half of the building as premium office space. And he has to do it while juggling all the other important clients who have recently showered business on his rapidly expanding firm. Ingels’ dazzlingly swift rise has inspired both awe and envy among his peers. Just as one triumphant building can make an architect’s reputation, however, it takes only one disaster to ruin it.
Ingels, never short on bravado, says he relishes the immense pressure.
"It is like this Zen exercise," he says. "Turning the force of your enemy into your own strength."
Conquering Skepticism
The first force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center was institutional inertia. Silverstein thought he had a perfectly good design from Foster—who declined to comment for this article—and the developer harbored serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings. He worried the stacked structure would look asymmetrical, even teetering, from certain perspectives.
"He just thought, like, could he see it fit in? No," Ingels recalls. "Was it a nice design for another place? Maybe, but not here."
Silverstein almost rejected the entire deal, until an endorsement from the architects of other World Trade Center buildings changed his mind. But that day on the roof, Ingels confides that he has just heard that Rupert Murdoch wants to review the latest version of the design himself.
The following Monday, the principals gathered in a conference room overlooking the site. Usually unflappable, Ingels was momentarily knocked off balance by the combative Australian media mogul’s rapid-fire questioning.
"It’s almost sort of like kangaroo boxing," Ingels says hours afterward, back at his office.
Murdoch’s deepest concern, according to multiple sources, amounted to a fundamental question: Why doesn’t it fall over? With some assistance from David Childs, the courtly architect of One World Trade Center, Ingels explained to his client that the leaning effect is an illusion. The unorthodox stepped form of the building resulted from placing the inner core—which houses a high-rise’s crucial elevator components—in an off-center position. This layout produces expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, sweeping views of the Trade Center plaza from Fox News studios, and private outdoor terraces. Murdoch was sold.
"Before you get that story, most people suspect that it’s all just follies," Ingels tells me. "The more blatantly the architect can explain why things are the way they are, the better."
In his efforts, Ingels could count on at least one powerful ally: James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. It was James, 42, who served as the moving force behind the decision to relocate his father’s companies, 21st Century Fox and News Corp., from an aging building near Rockefeller Center.
"It was funny," James says. "We sort of thought, ‘Let’s not hire a starchitect, let’s not build a big tower.’"
He originally wanted to create an open, loftlike, creative workplace. But after an extended exploration of potential sites, he ended up at the World Trade Center with Ingels: a star, but one who deeply understood his desires.
"We were struck by what a great problem solver he was," James says. "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, or rather the remnants of his design. As the result 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 to be built once Silverstein secured a major anchor tenant. But James didn’t think Foster’s stodgy skyscraper suited a media company’s needs. Ingels was similarly dismissive, calling the design "a generic extrusion with a flashy hat."
Piggybacking a new skyscraper onto Foster’s foundation, however, created tricky structural problems, especially in the lobby and lower floors, which had to be engineered to shift the tower’s immense weight onto preexisting supports. Whatever Ingels wanted to create high in the air had to connect seamlessly with what was already set deep in the ground.
Ten days after his meeting with Murdoch, I return to BIG’s offices, where everything is chaotic and half-boxed as the firm prepares to move to a larger space. Ingels is in his usual state of chic dishevelment, his hair mussed and his face lightly tanned with stubble. He grabs a marker and begins drawing on a whiteboard.
"A lot of towers, as they get over a certain height, they tend toward a square footprint," Ingels explains.
This generic form is dictated by cost and marketing—uniform floor plates are easier to lease—and engineering requirements. A skyscraper must withstand massive forces of gravity and wind. But Ingels thinks he has figured out how to shape his skyscraper differently.
"We just redistributed the calories," he says.
Ingels looks up from his board to see Ute Rinnebach, his project manager for Two World Trade Center, hurtle into the office just back from a meeting with the engineers.
"How did it go?" Ingels asks.
"Really bad," Rinnebach says. "I’ve got some horrible news for you."
Ingels’ idea for retrofitting the foundation involved shoring up walls and columns underground within the Port Authority’s domain, which turned out to be strictly forbidden. Like a Jenga block, removing that crucial bit of reinforcement could potentially cause the entire structural scheme to collapse. Ingels darts across the office to consult computer models with his design team. As they start working out solutions, he heads into a meeting with a facade consultant who delivers yet another crushing bit of news.
Ingels had developed complicated ideas about how to vary the alignment of the tower’s glass panes and the metal mullions separating them. To bring down the price of the facade—which consultants warned was running $60 million more than Foster’s version—Ingels thought he could use a thinner product for parts of the building. But the consultant informs him that New York Police Department security standards require all facades at the World Trade Center to be laminated safety glass, making them significantly heavier.
"I was like, fuck!" Ingels tells me later. "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."
Silverstein and Murdoch had reached a tense juncture in their bargaining, and anything departing from a rote formula was being assigned a heavy premium in construction-cost estimates.
"Right now," Ingels says, "the architecture is essentially held hostage."
Evolving Through Constraints
For a few weeks, the fate of the project remained very much in doubt.
"It’s trying to resolve all these issues without totally bastardizing the design," Ingels tells me one day in May, walking briskly toward his Tribeca apartment to pack for a trip to Cannes. He notes that he recently received an impromptu visit from Silverstein.
"He said, ‘You know, this is a historical moment, we can make this happen. We need to make this deal happen, and to do that, we need to make the design happen. There are these outstanding issues, and you, my friend, are the one who can solve them.’"
The engineers, however, remained fixated on the massing and scale of the building.
"At some point, everybody gets a little nervous about the whole thing," Ingels says, "and drastic solutions go on the table."
Ultimately, Ingels believes he averted disaster by agreeing to a series of painful structural compromises.
"I think it still sort of looks like itself," he says hopefully.
As our conversation continues around the World Trade Center site, Ingels reflects on his philosophy of design.
"I really like this idea that architecture is the art and science of trying to make everybody happy," he says. "Potentially, somewhere out there, there’s a design that can actually satisfy every dream, by being different."
Passing the tourists photographing Santiago Calatrava’s outlandishly expensive transit hub—an infamous example of architecture built without concessions—Ingels invokes an evolutionary metaphor.
"In Darwinian evolution, the animal has two primary instincts, right? 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 or climb into the tree. Or you’re the fish that escapes on land. You know, you discover new territory. In architecture, sometimes the eureka moment is actually when you give up a stance and say, OK, we have to try something else."
A Rapid Ascent
That evolutionary metaphor serves as an elegant rationalization of an unfortunate truth: An architect must learn to live with continual defeats. In his 2009 manifesto, Yes Is More, Ingels wrote that "most architectural projects either miscarry or die in early infancy," estimating that of 200 designs he produced in his first eight years, only 11 were built.
Fame has certainly increased his odds by allowing him to align with clients possessing deep pockets and powerful sway. Google, in particular, encouraged Ingels to let his imagination run wild. (When presented with a parking dilemma, Ingels recalls CEO Larry Page telling him, "It’s nothing that $50 million won’t solve.") But even the world’s most valuable company occasionally faces limitations; the city of Mountain View ultimately denied the development rights necessary to build the entire 2.5 million-square-foot complex.
Despite such setbacks, more work continues to flow toward BIG. In Manhattan alone, Ingels is simultaneously designing four major additions to the Hudson River skyline and a $335 million hybrid park and flood defense system known as the Dryline along the East River. In Washington, DC, he is working on a master plan for the South Mall campus of the Smithsonian Institution. Each high-profile commission brings BIG to the attention of increasingly prominent clients, including an NFL franchise owner who recently retained Ingels to work on a stadium project.
"Coming here to America five years ago, we were given the opportunity to try to reimagine the skyscraper, which is one of the great inventions of American architecture," Ingels says. "I think the American football stadium would be an awesome thing to take on."
Having founded BIG in Copenhagen just a decade ago, Ingels’ rocketing trajectory has thoroughly confounded industry expectations.
"He has just bypassed all the rest of the avant-garde," says Preston Scott Cohen, an acclaimed architect and professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where Ingels has also taught. "No one has done it that fast, with that degree of success. You name them, he has just flown right over their heads."
The Corporate Avant-Garde
Because of its complexity and expense—not to mention the towering egos of its practitioners—museum-grade architecture has long been restricted to specific civic projects. Profit-driven office buildings, by contrast, have traditionally been utilitarian domains managed by uninventive corporate firms. Ingels insists he wants BIG to be "both pragmatic and utopian," seeing no reason why artistry cannot be injected into office complexes and stadiums.
"It’s a genre shift, because he’s almost a corporate architect at this point," Cohen observes. "But I don’t think those are his ambitions. He did not grow up in that culture."
Ingels is a dedicated disciple of Rem Koolhaas, one of the greatest living architectural theorists, and began his career at Koolhaas’ firm, OMA, in 1998.
"From the very first time I met Bjarke as an intern, he was fearless," says Joshua Prince-Ramus, another Koolhaas protégé who worked alongside him at OMA. "He does not fear putting his ideas on the table. On anyone’s table."
Although Ingels quickly struck out on his own, the influence remained. When he describes the Manhattan skyline as "a raw agglomeration of evidence of commerce and finance and creativity and productivity," it is textbook Koolhaas. But while Koolhaas primarily outlined his ideas in provocative treatises like Delirious New York, he has never built anything of major note in the city. His former student, however, is actively seeking to make a tangible mark.
"Why is it that imaginative architects that do surprising and beautiful and thought-provoking stuff can’t do the really big buildings that matter?" Ingels wonders aloud during a quiet moment in his apartment.
The space is decorated with a pillowy couch of his own design and a road sign for Philip Johnson’s modernist Glass House in Connecticut. While Ingels largely disdains the dogmas of the Modernists, blaming them for reducing office buildings to "boring boxes," he remains fond of a famous Philip Johnson quote: "I am a whore."
"His strength and his weakness is that he is so promiscuous," Ingels says of his own philosophy. "Aesthetically and academically promiscuous."
Rejecting the notion that an architect must adhere to a single personal aesthetic enables Ingels to remain cheerfully flexible when meeting the demands of corporate clients. His apartment tower on West 57th Street—what he dubs a "courtscraper"—combines the height of a New York high-rise with the communal interior courtyard of a European perimeter block.
Douglas Durst, the property’s owner and a major New York developer, took a significant gamble hiring Ingels in 2010 when he was still largely unknown in the United States.
"Many architects, when they finish a design, they tell you, that’s it, that’s my design," Durst says. "He likes it when you give him a problem that has to get solved."
Unveiling the Vision
By early June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch was finally in place. Although many provisions of the long-term lease remained under negotiation, 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 a fellow architect: Daniel Libeskind. Libeskind laid out the master plan for the new World Trade Center complex, serving as a cautionary example of how the development process can break an architect. A decade ago, Libeskind was the toast of New York before running into the unforgiving realities of real estate politics and opposition from Silverstein.
That past conflict seemed largely forgotten one morning when Silverstein executives joined the two architects for a presentation in BIG’s conference room. On the table stood a large, glowing plastic replica of Two World Trade Center. Ingels took care to show how the building respected Libeskind’s beloved "Wedge of Light" plaza, displaying a rendering of the lobby where diagonal columns resolved the structural alignment challenges posed by Foster’s foundation.
"We get an almost Libeskind-esque language," Ingels noted, "defined simply by connecting the dots."
Libeskind delivered his verdict with a sharp slap on the table: "Congratulations, that is a super building."
Yet initial praise aside, Libeskind understands the road ahead.
"Between that first smile and the last stone is the challenge of architecture," Libeskind notes, pointing to the complex web of economics, power brokers, and politicians that defines New York real estate.
As Ingels’ team continues to refine the tower, balancing costs, structural requirements, and stakeholder demands, the architect remains unfazed by the perpetual friction. Whether pitching whimsical waterfront pavilions or battling over the budget of a multi-billion-dollar downtown skyscraper, Ingels views every constraint not as an impediment, but as an integral part of the grand equation.
Standing near the World Trade Center site, making a framing box in the air with his hands, Ingels looks toward the empty lot where his tower will rise.
"Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit," he says, a boyish grin spreading across his face. "I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
