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 the most important commission of his young career: his design for the skyscraper known as Two World Trade Center.
It is still a work in progress, and his primary client—the imperious media magnate Rupert Murdoch—has yet to formally sign off. Yet the hyper-eloquent 40-year-old does not let doubt stand in the way of his video introduction. 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 companies remains one of New York real estate’s biggest secrets. But Ingels cannot 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 the last of four envisioned in the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center. The ensemble rings two cascading pools that pay tribute to the roughly 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 that despite his acclaim, "we still haven’t completed a skyscraper."
With Two World Trade Center, Ingels believes he has imagined a way to create a new kind of high-rise work environment—one that turns a form fundamentally vertical and hierarchical into a place for horizontal interaction. Now comes the laborious part: proving he can transform that captivating story into hard facts on the ground.
Navigating Power Brokers and Structural Realities
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. Murdoch and Silverstein still had to agree on a long-term lease, a crucial step required to finance the $4 billion skyscraper.
"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, other hazards remained: a volatile real estate market, the political melodrama inherent in building on a site 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, leveling many an architectural ambition. Ingels’ design actually displaced an earlier concept by Lord Norman Foster. (Turnabout is fair play: Foster had similarly pushed aside Ingels on a previous project for a national library in Kazakhstan.)
To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had to balance the sometimes conflicting demands of Murdoch and Silverstein, who planned to market the top half of the building as office space. At the same time, he had to juggle a growing portfolio of international clients who had recently showered business on his firm, BIG (an acronym for Bjarke Ingels Group). Ingels’ dazzlingly swift rise has inspired awe and envy among his peers. Just as one triumphant building can make an architect’s reputation, it takes only one disaster to ruin it.
Yet Ingels, never short on bravado, says he relishes the pressure. "It is like this Zen exercise," he says. "Turning the force of your enemy into your own strength."
The first force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center was inertia. Silverstein thought he had a perfectly good design from Foster and expressed serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings, fearing the stacked structure would look asymmetrical—even teetering—from certain perspectives. Silverstein almost 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 says hours afterward, back at his office. Murdoch’s deepest concern amounted to a simple 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 is an illusion. The unorthodox stepped form of the building resulted from placing the inner core—which houses elevators—in an off-center position. This layout produced expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, views of the 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 says. "The more blatantly the architect can explain why things are the way they are, the better."
Ingels also counted on a powerful ally in James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. It was James, 42, who drove the decision to relocate his father’s companies, 21st Century Fox and News Corp., from an aging building near Rockefeller Center.
"We sort of thought, ‘Let’s not hire a starchitect, let’s not build a big tower,’" James recalls. He wanted an open, loftlike creative workplace. But after exploring potential sites, he ended up at the World Trade Center with Ingels—a star who understood his vision. "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."
Engineering Hurdles and the Cost of Innovation
The foremost constraint involved Foster’s legacy. As the result of a political compromise between Silverstein and the Port Authority, Foster’s foundation had already been constructed to support a $4 billion underground transportation hub. Piggybacking a new skyscraper onto that existing foundation created tricky structural problems, especially in the lobby and lower floors, which had to shift the tower’s massive weight onto preexisting supports.
Ten days after his meeting with Murdoch, Ingels is in his office as it undergoes packing for a larger space. A project manager, Ute Rinnebach, returns from a meeting with the structural engineers bearing bad news: Ingels’ idea to retrofit the foundation by shoring up underground walls in the Port Authority’s domain is strictly prohibited. Removing that reinforcement could destabilize the entire structural scheme.
Simultaneously, a facade consultant delivers another blow. Ingels had planned to use thinner glass on parts of the building to reduce costs, offsetting a facade price tag running $60 million higher than Foster’s design. However, New York Police Department security standards mandate that all facades at the World Trade Center utilize heavier laminated safety glass to withstand explosions.
"I was like, fuck!" Ingels recalls. "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."
With Silverstein and Murdoch navigating a tense juncture in their lease negotiations, any departure from standard construction formulas triggered severe cost penalties. For weeks, the fate of the project hung in the balance. Ultimately, Ingels averted disaster by agreeing to painful structural changes while preserving the building’s distinctive identity.
By early June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch fell into place. Before publicly unveiling the design, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the master planner for the World Trade Center complex. In BIG’s conference room, Ingels presented a glowing physical model, demonstrating how the design respected Libeskind’s "Wedge of Light" plaza and solved structural alignment challenges using diagonal columns.
Libeskind struck the table with approval. "Congratulations, that is a super building," he said, adding with a touch of mischief: "I hope we’re going to see it going up."
Initial public reviews of Two World Trade Center were largely positive, though the building’s height subsequently shrank by 90 feet amid ongoing design refinements. Furthermore, the tower acquired an unexpected critic in Douglas Durst, operator of the neighboring One World Trade Center, who voiced displeasure over the orientation of the stepped gardens.
Despite such friction, Ingels remains unapologetically pragmatic about his rapid trajectory. Founding BIG in Copenhagen just a decade ago, his rocketing ascent has confounded traditional expectations in a field where careers typically build slowly through decades of critical accrual.
"He has just bypassed all the rest of the avant-garde," says Preston Scott Cohen, an acclaimed architect and Harvard professor. "No one has done it that fast, with that degree of success."
As BIG expands its footprint across Manhattan—designing residential towers, the $335 million Dryline flood defense system, and master plans in Washington, D.C.—Ingels continues to champion an architecture that is both utopian and pragmatic.
"In architecture, sometimes the eureka moment is actually when you give up a stance and say, OK, we have to try something else," Ingels says. "It’s a gigantic equation with multiple variables, where a lot of the variables claim to be fixed. You must find out which of the ones are actually variable."
