On a misty April morning in Lower Manhattan, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels stood high above a cobblestoned street, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped. The 40-year-old 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.
At the time, the project was still a work in progress, and his primary client—media magnate Rupert Murdoch—had yet to give his final approval. The hyper-eloquent Ingels refused to let doubt stand in the way of his vision, however. He had obsessed over every line and image, telling his director that he wanted viewers to swoon. While Murdoch’s plan to relocate his companies was still one of New York real estate’s best-kept secrets, Ingels was ready to shout the news 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 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 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 preoccupied with replicating 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 gift for storytelling: an ability to construct a compelling narrative around practical necessities. Often, his designs careen in fantastical directions.
At the time, he was building a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen featuring a slanted roof designed to double 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 and collaborator Thomas Heatherwick envisioned an 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 architecture standards. But fame can be a deceptive indicator in his profession, where an architect’s work often takes years of arduous labor to materialize. Ingels’ largest project to date at the time, a striking pyramidal apartment building under construction along Manhattan’s West Side Highway at 57th Street, was 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 acknowledged, "and we still haven’t completed a skyscraper."
With Two World Trade Center, Ingels believed he had found a way to create a new kind of high-rise work environment, turning a form that is fundamentally vertical and hierarchical into a place for horizontal interaction. Now came the laborious part: showing that he was capable of transforming that captivating story into hard facts on the ground.
Playfully calling his firm BIG, Ingels championed an approach he termed "BIGamy." Rather than adhering to a single aesthetic, he tailored his ideas to meet client demands, all in service of designs unlike anything seen before.
To realize his design, however, Ingels had to continually prove its value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Rupert Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the developer who had controlled much of the World Trade Center rebuilding. 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 said during 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 bureaucracy, embodied by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
For 14 years, these factors had conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, leveling many an architectural ambition. Ingels’ design had actually displaced an earlier one by Lord Norman Foster. To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had to balance the sometimes conflicting demands of Murdoch and Silverstein while juggling all the other major clients who had recently showered business on his rapidly growing firm.
Navigating Power Brokers and Structural Realities
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 and harbored serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings, fearing the stacked structure would look asymmetrical or teetering from certain perspectives. Silverstein almost rejected the entire deal before receiving endorsements from the architects of other World Trade Center buildings.
Shortly after, Ingels faced a grueling review session with Rupert Murdoch. Unflappable under normal circumstances, Ingels found himself knocked off balance by the media mogul’s rapid-fire questioning. Murdoch’s deepest concern boiled down to a fundamental question: 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 of the building resulted from placing the inner core—which housed essential elevators—in an off-center position. This layout produced expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, sweeping views of the Trade Center plaza from Fox News studios, and outdoor terraces. Murdoch was convinced.
In his efforts, Ingels also counted on James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. James had been the driving force behind the decision to relocate 21st Century Fox and News Corp. from an aging building near Rockefeller Center. Looking for an open, loftlike, creative workplace, James found in Ingels a problem solver capable of taking strict constraints and creating something surprising and effective.
The foremost constraint involved the remnants of Norman Foster’s previous design. As a 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 be engineered to shift the tower’s weight onto preexisting supports.
When Ingels proposed retrofitting the foundation by shoring up walls and columns underground within the Port Authority’s domain, he hit a roadblock: it was strictly forbidden. Removing that crucial bit of reinforcement risked destabilizing the entire structural scheme.
Compounding the problem, a facade consultant informed Ingels that New York Police Department security standards required all facades at the World Trade Center to be constructed from heavier laminated safety glass to withstand potential explosions. This standard eliminated Ingels’ plan to use thinner materials to offset mounting costs, adding tens of millions of dollars to the budget.
"I was like, fuck!" Ingels recalled. "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."
As Silverstein and Murdoch reached a tense juncture in their bargaining, any departure from standard architectural formulas carried a heavy financial premium. "Right now," Ingels noted, "the architecture is essentially held hostage."
Embracing Pragmatism and Evolution
Despite weeks of uncertainty and painful structural compromises, Ingels managed to steer the project through its crises by working closely with Silverstein’s team and adjusting his plans. 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 the public unveiling, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the architect who laid out the master plan for the new World Trade Center complex. In BIG’s conference room, surrounded by a glowing plastic model of the tower, Ingels demonstrated how his design respected Libeskind’s original vision, including the plaza known as the Wedge of Light. Libeskind gave his approval with a firm slap on the table, calling it a "super building."
Initial reviews of the design were largely positive, though challenges remained. Douglas Durst, the developer operating One World Trade Center next door, voiced public disappointment with the orientation of the stepped gardens, arguing that the design turned its back on his building.
Nevertheless, Ingels continued pressing forward with a growing portfolio of high-profile projects, including plans for the Smithsonian’s South Mall campus in Washington, DC, residential towers in Manhattan, and the Dryline flood defense system along the East River.
Reflecting on his rapid ascent, Ingels maintained that the key to modern architecture lies not in rigid adherence to a single aesthetic, but in the cheerful flexibility required to solve complex, real-world equations.
"In architecture, sometimes the eureka moment is actually when you give up a stance and say, OK, we have to try something else," Ingels said. "I really like this idea that architecture is the art and science of trying to make everybody happy. Potentially, somewhere out there, there’s a design that can actually satisfy every dream, by being different."
