On a misty April morning, Bjarke Ingels stands on the roof of an old brick building high above the cobblestoned streets of Lower Manhattan, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped. The Danish architect is shooting a promotional film for the most important commission of his young career: his design for the skyscraper known as Two World Trade Center.
Still very much a work in progress, the project has yet to receive final sign-off from his primary client, the imperious media magnate Rupert Murdoch. Yet the hyper-eloquent 40-year-old architect is not letting doubt stand in the way of his video introduction. Having obsessed over every line and image, he tells his director that he wants viewers to swoon. At this moment, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his corporate empire remains 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, his 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 addition to the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center site. The 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. Ingels, however, is not preoccupied with that somber history; he wants to make his own.
"The memorial is about the memorial," he reflects. "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 gift for storytelling: an ability to construct a compelling narrative around 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 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—along with collaborator Thomas Heatherwick—created an 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 precocious by 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 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 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 acknowledges, "we still haven’t completed a skyscraper."
With Two World Trade Center, Ingels believes he has imagined a way to create a radically new kind of high-rise work environment—one that transforms a form traditionally defined by verticality and hierarchy into a place for horizontal interaction. Now comes the laborious part: proving he is capable of turning that captivating story into hard facts on the ground.
Ingels playfully calls his firm BIG, and his approach to architecture "BIGamy." Rather than adhering to a single aesthetic, he tailors his ideas to meet client demands, all in service of designs unlike anything seen before.
Navigating Power Brokers and Politics
To realize his design, Ingels has 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 had to agree on a long-term lease to allow the $4 billion skyscraper to be financed.
"There’s a lot of drama with the deal right now," Ingels said the day of the film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be."
Even if the parties came to an agreement, there were 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, embodied by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the lumbering transportation agency that owns the land beneath the Trade Center buildings.
For 14 years, these factors conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, upending many architectural ambitions. In fact, Ingels’ design displaced an earlier proposal by Lord Norman Foster. (Turnabout is 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 would be marketing the top half of the building as office space. And he had to do it while juggling all the other prominent clients who had recently showered business on his firm. Ingels’ dazzlingly swift rise has inspired awe and envy in equal measure among his peers. Just as one triumphant building can make an architect’s reputation, it takes only one disaster to ruin it.
Never short on bravado, Ingels says he relishes the pressure. "It is like this Zen exercise," he explains. "Turning the force of your enemy into your own strength."
The first force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center was institutional inertia. Silverstein initially believed he had a perfectly good design from Foster—who declined to comment for this article—and harbored serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings. He worried the stacked structure would look asymmetrical, even teetering, from certain angles.
"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 nearly rejected the entire deal until an endorsement from the architects of other World Trade Center buildings changed his mind.
The following Monday, the principals gathered in a conference room overlooking the site. Usually unflappable, Ingels was knocked off balance by the combative Australian media magnate’s rapid-fire questioning.
"It’s almost sort of like kangaroo boxing," Ingels said hours afterward.
Murdoch’s deepest 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 an optical illusion. The unorthodox stepped form of the building resulted from placing the inner core—which houses a high-rise’s crucial elevators—in an off-center position. This layout produced expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, views of the Trade Center plaza from Fox News studios, and outdoor terraces. Murdoch was sold.
"Before you get that story, most people suspect that it’s all just follies," Ingels reflects. "The more blatantly the architect can explain why things are the way they are, the better."
Ingels also counted on a powerful internal ally: James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. It was James, then 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 initially wanted to create an open, loftlike, creative workplace. But after exploring potential sites, he ended up at the World Trade Center with Ingels—a star, but one who understood his vision.
"We were struck by what a great problem solver he was," James notes. "This is someone who can take a set of constraints and create something surprising and effective out of them."
Engineering Realities and Design Compromises
The foremost constraint involved Foster’s legacy—specifically, 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.
However, James Murdoch did not feel Foster’s stodgy skyscraper suited a media company’s needs, and 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 weight onto preexisting supports. Whatever Ingels wanted to create high in the air had to connect to what was already set deep in the ground.
Ten days after his meeting with Murdoch, Ingels found himself facing a series of harsh engineering realities. His idea for retrofitting the foundation involved shoring up walls and columns underground within the Port Authority’s domain—a non-starter. Removing that crucial bit of reinforcement could cause the entire structural scheme to fail. Furthermore, a facade consultant delivered another piece of troubling news: New York Police Department security standards required all facades at the World Trade Center to be made of laminated safety glass, increasing the weight and running counter to Ingels’ plans for cost-saving thinner materials.
"I was like, fuck!" Ingels admits. "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."
With Silverstein and Murdoch navigating a tense juncture in their bargaining, any departure from standard architectural formulas threatened to inflate construction costs. For a few weeks, the fate of the project hung in the balance. Ultimately, Ingels averted disaster by agreeing to painful structural changes, though he managed to preserve the core visual identity of the design.
Expanding Horizons
By early June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch was in place, and the parties publicly unveiled the design for Two World Trade Center. Before doing so, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the master planner for the World Trade Center site.
Gathered in BIG’s conference room alongside Silverstein executives, Ingels presented a glowing plastic model of the tower, taking care to show how the building respected Libeskind’s Wedge of Light plaza. He explained how an array of diagonal columns in the lobby solved the challenge of aligning structural supports with Foster’s pre-existing foundation.
Libeskind offered his verdict with a decisive slap on the table: "Congratulations, that is a super building."
Initial reviews of the design were largely positive, but Libeskind was quick to offer a cautionary reminder of 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, society, power brokers, and politicians that defines New York real estate.
As BIG continues to expand its footprint—juggling projects ranging from Manhattan’s Hudson River skyline additions to the $335 million hybrid park and flood defense system known as the Dryline, alongside master plans for the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.—Ingels remains committed to his pragmatic yet utopian vision.
Reflecting on his rapid ascent and the ongoing evolution of his architectural practice, Ingels remains undeterred by the immense pressure of his commissions.
"In architecture, sometimes the eureka moment is actually when you give up a stance and say, OK, we have to try something else," he says. "Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit. I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
