On a misty April day in Lower Manhattan, Bjarke Ingels stands on the roof of an old brick building high above a cobblestoned street, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped. The Danish architect is shooting a promotional film about the most important commission of his young career: his striking 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, media magnate Rupert Murdoch. But 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, Ingels 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. Yet 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. The architectural ensemble will ring two cascading pools that pay tribute to the roughly 3,000 people who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But Ingels is not preoccupied with memorializing the past; he wants to make his own history.
"The memorial is about the memorial," Ingels explains. "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 rare 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, 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—collaborating with designer Thomas Heatherwick—conceived 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 precocious by the exacting standards of the architecture profession. Yet fame can be a deceptive indicator in his line of work, where an architect’s creations, much like the light of a distant star, only reach the public eye after a years-long journey.
Ingels’ largest completed 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 discovered a way to reinvent the high-rise work environment, transforming a form that is traditionally vertical and hierarchical into a dynamic space for horizontal interaction. Now comes the laborious part: proving that he is capable of transforming that captivating narrative into hard facts on the ground.
Playfully calling his firm BIG, Ingels practices an approach he dubs "BIGamy." Rather than adhering to a single, rigid aesthetic, he tailors his ideas to meet the diverse demands of his clients—all in the service of producing designs unlike anything seen before.
Navigating Power and Politics
To realize his design, Ingels must continually prove its value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Rupert Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the veteran developer who has controlled much of the World Trade Center rebuilding effort. Murdoch and Silverstein still need to finalize a long-term lease agreement that would allow the $4 billion skyscraper to secure financing.
"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, numerous hazards remain on the horizon: a volatile real estate market, the political melodrama inherent in building on a site of mass murder, and an often inflexible government bureaucracy embodied by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency that owns the underlying land.
For 14 years, these compounding factors have conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching forward unpredictably, dashing many an architectural ambition along the way. In fact, Ingels’ design displaced an earlier proposal by Lord Norman Foster. (Turnabout is fair play: Foster had similarly pushed aside Ingels on an earlier project for a national library in Kazakhstan.)
To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels must balance the sometimes conflicting demands of Murdoch and Silverstein, who plan to market the top half of the building as office space. At the same time, he must juggle a roster of other major clients who have recently showered business on his rapidly expanding firm. Ingels’ dazzlingly swift rise has inspired both awe and envy among his peers. Yet in architecture, just as one triumphant building can make a reputation, a single disaster can ruin it.
Never one to shy away from bravado, Ingels insists he relishes the pressure.
"It is like this Zen exercise," he says. "Turning the force of your enemy into your own strength."
The First Obstacle: Inertia
The initial force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center was institutional inertia. Silverstein believed he already had a perfectly good design from Foster—who declined to comment for this report—and the developer harbored serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings. Silverstein worried the stacked, stepped structure would appear asymmetrical or 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 proposal outright, until an endorsement from the architects behind other World Trade Center buildings changed his mind. But on the day of the rooftop shoot, Ingels learns that Rupert Murdoch wants to review the latest iteration of the design in person.
The following Monday, the principals gathered in a conference room overlooking the site. Usually unflappable, Ingels was momentarily knocked off balance by the combative media mogul’s rapid-fire questioning.
"It’s almost sort of like kangaroo boxing," Ingels says hours later back at his office.
Murdoch’s chief concern centered on 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 is an optical illusion. The unorthodox stepped form of the building stems from placing the structural core—which houses high-speed elevators—in an off-center position. This layout yields expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, sweeping 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 notes. "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 the younger Murdoch who drove 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.’"
Instead, he initially sought an open, loftlike, creative workplace. But after an exhaustive exploration of potential sites, he ended up at the World Trade Center—and paired 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 Realities and Design Compromises
The foremost constraint involved Foster’s legacy, or rather the remnants of his design. Due to 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 supposed to rise once Silverstein secured a major anchor tenant.
James Murdoch, however, felt Foster’s stodgy skyscraper did not suit a modern media company. Ingels was similarly dismissive, calling the design "a generic extrusion with a flashy hat."
Piggybacking a new skyscraper onto Foster’s existing foundation created severe structural hurdles, particularly in the lobby and lower floors, which had to be engineered to transfer the new tower’s massive weight onto preexisting supports. Whatever Ingels envisioned high in the air had to connect seamlessly with what was already set deep in the ground.
Ten days after meeting with Murdoch, Ingels returns to his office amid the chaos of packing for a larger space. Grabbing a marker, he begins sketching 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 typically dictated by cost, marketing—uniform floor plates are easier to lease—and engineering requirements to withstand gravity and wind. But Ingels believed he could shape his skyscraper differently.
"We just redistributed the calories," he says.
His optimism is soon tested when Ute Rinnebach, his project manager for Two World Trade Center, rushes back from a meeting with the structural engineers.
"How did it go?" Ingels asks.
"Really bad," Rinnebach replies. "I’ve got some horrible news for you."
Ingels’ plan for retrofitting the foundation involved shoring up walls and columns underground within the Port Authority’s jurisdiction—a modification that is strictly forbidden. Removing that crucial reinforcement risked compromising the entire structural scheme. Racing to computer models with his design team, Ingels seeks solutions, only to be hit by another blow from a facade consultant.
Ingels had planned to vary the alignment of the tower’s glass panes and metal mullions to cut costs, keeping the facade budget in line. However, the consultant informs him that New York Police Department security standards mandate that all facades at the World Trade Center use heavy laminated safety glass to withstand potential 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 from explosions."
As Silverstein and Murdoch navigate tense lease negotiations, any deviation from standard construction formulas incurs steep cost estimates.
"Right now," Ingels says, "the architecture is essentially held hostage."
For weeks, the project’s fate hangs in the balance. But after agreeing to several painful structural modifications, Ingels manages to preserve the core identity of the design.
Meeting Silverstein executives near the World Trade Center plaza, Ingels receives a warm embrace from Janno Lieber, Silverstein’s second-in-command.
"I gotta tell you, I gotta give you a hug," Lieber says. "That was a helluva turnaround that you guys did in the last week."
"Suddenly, the sum of a lot of nudges adds up," Ingels replies.
Reflecting on the ordeal later, Ingels views the setbacks through the lens of evolution.
"In Darwinian evolution, the animal has two primary instincts, right? Fight or flight," he says. "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."
Rising Fast on a Global Stage
That evolutionary metaphor rationalizes an unfortunate truth of the profession: architects must 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 produced in his first eight years, only 11 were built.
Fame has improved those odds by pairing him with affluent and influential clients. Google encouraged him to let his imagination run wild, with CEO Larry Page reportedly telling him regarding a parking dilemma, "It’s nothing that $50 million won’t solve." Yet even Google faced a setback when the city of Mountain View denied development rights for their entire 2.5 million-square-foot complex.
Despite such hurdles, work continues to flood into 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, D.C., he is spearheading a master plan for the Smithsonian’s South Mall campus.
Having founded BIG in Copenhagen only a decade ago, Ingels’ meteoric rise has upended 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. "No one has done it that fast, with that degree of success. You name them, he has just flown right over their heads."
By bridging the gap between utopian vision and pragmatic execution, Ingels has demonstrated that artistry can thrive in profit-driven commercial real estate and megaprojects. As he settles into BIG’s new offices overlooking Broadway and the World Trade Center, the architect remains characteristically upbeat about the journey ahead.
"Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit," Ingels says, framing a view of the skyline with his hands. "I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
