On a misty April morning in Lower Manhattan, Bjarke Ingels stood on the roof of an old brick building above a cobblestone street, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped. The 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.
Still a work in progress at the time, the project awaited formal sign-off from his primary client, the media magnate Rupert Murdoch. Yet the hyper-eloquent 40-year-old architect refused to 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 that moment, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his media empire remained one of New York real estate’s best-kept secrets. But Ingels was practically ready to shout the news from the rooftops.
Between takes, Ingels pointed toward a void in the densely packed Manhattan skyline, tracing the profile of a skyscraper only he could see. From his vantage point, his design resembled a stack of seven rectangular 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. But Ingels was not preoccupied with mourning; 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 public image—but his greatest asset is a rare gift for storytelling: an ability to construct an engaging narrative around practical necessities.
Often, his designs careen in fantastical directions. He engineered 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—collaborating with designer Thomas Heatherwick—envisioned a sprawling 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 architecture standards. Yet 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 completed project in New York at the time, a striking pyramidal apartment building along the 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 hadn’t completed a single skyscraper. With Two World Trade Center, Ingels believed he had found a way to create a radically new kind of high-rise work environment—one that transformed a form traditionally defined by vertical hierarchy into a space for horizontal interaction. Then came the laborious part: proving he could turn that captivating narrative into concrete reality on the ground.
Playfully naming his firm BIG and describing his approach as "BIGamy," Ingels rejects a single, fixed aesthetic. Instead, he tailors his ideas to meet the demands of his clients, all in service of creating designs unlike anything seen before.
To realize his design for Two World Trade Center, however, Ingels had to continually 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 still needed to agree on a long-term lease to finance the $4 billion skyscraper.
"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 if the parties reached an agreement, other hazards loomed: a volatile real estate market, the political melodrama inherent in building on a site of mass tragedy, and an often inflexible government bureaucracy, embodied by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency owning the land beneath the complex.
For 14 years, these combined factors had kept the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, dashing many architectural ambitions. In fact, Ingels’ design displaced an earlier proposal by Lord Norman Foster. (Turnabout is fair play, as Foster had previously pushed aside Ingels on a library project in Kazakhstan.) To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had to balance the conflicting demands of Murdoch and Silverstein, who planned to market the top half of the building as office space, while juggling numerous other high-profile commissions.
Navigating Constraints and Overcoming Inertia
The first force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center was institutional inertia. Silverstein believed he already had a sound design from Foster and harbored serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings, fearing the stacked structure would look asymmetrical or teetering from certain perspectives. Silverstein nearly rejected the deal entirely before receiving reassurance from the architects of the complex’s other buildings.
Shortly after, Murdoch requested a review of the design. During a high-stakes meeting in a conference room overlooking the site, Murdoch barraged Ingels with rapid-fire questions, focusing primarily on structural safety. 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 resulted from placing the core housing elevators off-center, generating expansive interior spaces, clear views of the plaza for Fox News studios, and outdoor terraces. Murdoch was 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."
Ingels also found a powerful 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, James initially sought an open, loftlike, creative workspace rather than a traditional starchitect tower. Ultimately, however, he was drawn to the World Trade Center site and Ingels’ creative problem-solving.
Still, remnants of Foster’s previous design posed severe engineering hurdles. Political compromises between Silverstein and the Port Authority had already established a foundation to accommodate an underground transportation hub, meaning Ingels’ new tower had to connect seamlessly with existing deep-ground supports.
When Ingels proposed retrofitting the foundation to support his stacked design, engineers delivered grim news: removing crucial underground reinforcements could compromise the entire structural integrity. Furthermore, New York Police Department security standards required all facades at the World Trade Center to use heavy laminated safety glass for blast protection, driving up estimated construction costs significantly.
With negotiations between Silverstein and Murdoch teetering on a knife-edge, any design departures from standard construction formulas threatened to derail the project.
"Right now," Ingels noted during the height of the tension, "the architecture is essentially held hostage."
The Miracle of Realized Ambition
Through careful structural compromises that preserved the essential character of the building while satisfying engineers, Ingels managed to avert disaster. His ability to navigate the complex web of real estate economics, politics, and corporate demands earned him praise from key stakeholders, including Silverstein executives.
Reflecting on the turbulent process, Ingels drew on an evolutionary metaphor to describe his philosophy.
"In Darwinian evolution, the animal has two primary instincts, right? Fight or flight," he observed. "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 philosophy has fueled BIG’s meteoric rise. Founded in Copenhagen just a decade prior, the firm expanded rapidly, taking on massive global initiatives including the Dryline flood defense system in Manhattan, the Smithsonian South Mall master plan in Washington, D.C., and ongoing residential and cultural projects across the globe.
By the summer of 2015, a tentative lease agreement between Silverstein and Murdoch fell into place, clearing the path for the public unveiling of Two World Trade Center. Before the official reveal, Ingels presented the glowing scale model of the tower to Daniel Libeskind, the original master planner of the site whose own ambitions had previously clashed with developers. Libeskind examined the design, delivered an approving slap on the table, and congratulated him on a "super building."
Initial public reviews of the design were largely positive, though challenges remained as project details continued to evolve. Yet for Ingels, the hurdles of practice—balancing practicality with utopian imagination—remain central to the architectural craft.
Back at BIG’s new headquarters on Broadway, overlooking a bustling Lower Manhattan, Ingels addressed his growing team of international architects during a morning champagne toast, celebrating their new space and a growing slate of ambitious global projects. For an architect who treats urban skylines as canvases for human enterprise, the journey from fiction to fact is a relentless pursuit.
"Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit," Ingels said, framing a view of the World Trade Center site with his hands. "I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
