On a misty April morning in Lower Manhattan, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels stood high above a cobblestoned street on the roof of an old brick building, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped. He was shooting a promotional film for the most important commission of his young career: a 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—the imperious media magnate Rupert Murdoch—had yet to formally sign off. Yet the hyper-eloquent 40-year-old architect refused to let doubt stand in the way of his vision. Having obsessed over every line and image, he told his director that he wanted viewers to swoon. At this moment, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his media companies remained one of New York real estate’s best-kept secrets. But Ingels could hardly wait to shout the news, quite literally, from the rooftops.
Between takes, Ingels pointed toward 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, serving as the final addition to the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center site. The ensemble would 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 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 a 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.
For instance, he designed 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 wildly 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. Yet 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 completed up to that point—a striking pyramidal apartment building under construction along Manhattan’s West Side Highway at 57th Street, known as Via 57 West—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. "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: one that turns a form fundamentally vertical and hierarchical into a place for horizontal interaction. Next came the laborious part: proving he was capable of transforming that captivating story into hard facts on the ground.
Navigating Power and Politics
To realize his design, Ingels had to continually prove its value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Rupert Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the developer who 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 on the day of the film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be."
Even if the parties reached 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 inflexible government bureaucracy embodied by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency owning the land beneath the Trade Center.
For 14 years, these factors had conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, leveling 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 planned to market the top half of the building as office space. At the same time, he was juggling other important clients who had recently commissioned work for his firm, playfully named BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group). Ingels’ dazzlingly swift rise inspired both awe and envy among his peers. As he well knew, just as one triumphant building can make an architect’s reputation, it takes only one disaster to ruin it.
The first force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center was institutional inertia. Silverstein initially thought he had a perfectly good design from Foster—who declined to comment for this coverage—and harbored serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings. He feared the stacked structure would look asymmetrical, or even teetering, from certain angles.
"He just thought, like, could he see it fit in? No," Ingels recalled. "Was it a nice design for another place? Maybe, but not here."
Silverstein almost rejected the entire deal until an endorsement from the architects of other World Trade Center buildings changed his mind. Soon after, Ingels learned that Rupert Murdoch himself wanted to review the latest design iteration.
The following Monday, the principals gathered in a conference room overlooking the site. Usually unflappable, Ingels was momentarily knocked off balance by the Australian media mogul’s rapid-fire questioning.
"It’s almost sort of like kangaroo boxing," Ingels remarked hours afterward back at his office. Murdoch’s primary concern was deceptively simple: 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 resulted from placing the inner core—which houses crucial elevator shafts—in an off-center position. This layout created 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 noted. "The more blatantly the architect can explain why things are the way they are, the better."
In his efforts, Ingels found a powerful ally in James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. It was James 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 said. He wanted an open, loftlike, creative workplace. But after an extended exploration of potential sites, he ended up at the World Trade Center with Ingels—a star architect who understood his desires. "We were struck by what a great problem solver he was," James added. "This is someone who can take a set of constraints and create something surprising and effective out of them."
Engineering Hurdles and Architectural Compromises
The foremost constraint involved Foster’s remaining foundation. As a result of a political compromise between Silverstein and the Port Authority, Foster’s foundation had already been constructed to support a $4 underground transportation hub. The rest of the tower was slated for construction once Silverstein secured an anchor tenant.
However, James Murdoch did not feel Foster’s stodgy skyscraper suited a media company’s needs, and Ingels dismissed the design as "a generic extrusion with a flashy hat." Piggybacking a new skyscraper onto Foster’s foundation, however, created tricky structural problems. The lobby and lower floors had to be engineered to shift the tower’s weight onto preexisting supports. Everything Ingels wanted to create high in the air had to connect securely to what was already set deep in the ground.
Ten days after meeting with Murdoch, Ingels was working in his office as the firm prepared to move into a larger space. Ingels grabbed a marker and began drawing on a whiteboard.
"A lot of towers, as they get over a certain height, tend toward a square footprint," Ingels explained. This generic form is typically dictated by cost, marketing, and engineering, as uniform floor plates are easier to lease and withstand massive gravity and wind forces. But Ingels believed he could shape his skyscraper differently. "We just redistributed the calories," he said.
Suddenly, Ute Rinnebach, his project manager for Two World Trade Center, hurried back from a meeting with the engineers.
"How did it go?" Ingels asked.
"Really bad," Rinnebach replied. "I’ve got some horrible news for you."
Ingels’ idea for retrofitting the foundation involved shoring up underground walls and columns within the Port Authority’s domain, which turned out to be strictly forbidden. Like a Jenga block, removing that crucial reinforcement could cause the structural scheme to collapse. Ingels rushed to consult computer models with his design team. As they worked on solutions, a facade consultant delivered another setback.
Ingels had devised complex ideas for varying the alignment of the tower’s glass panes and metal mullions. To lower facade costs—which consultants estimated were running $60 million higher than Foster’s design—Ingels planned to use a thinner product for parts of the building. However, the consultant informed him that New York Police Department security standards required all facades at the World Trade Center to be laminated safety glass, making them significantly heavier.
"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."
With Silverstein and Murdoch navigating a tense bargaining juncture, any departure from standard formulas incurred steep construction-cost estimates. "Right now," Ingels observed, "the architecture is essentially held hostage."
For a few weeks, the project’s fate hung in the balance. "It’s trying to resolve all these issues without totally bastardizing the design," Ingels said. Eventually, by agreeing to painful structural changes, he felt he averted disaster. "I think it still sort of looks like itself," he noted hopefully.
The Pragmatic Utopian
By early June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch was in place. Although long-term lease provisions remained under negotiation, the parties publicly unveiled the design for Two World Trade Center. First, however, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the architect behind the master plan for the revitalized World Trade Center complex. A decade earlier, Libeskind had been the toast of New York before running into the unforgiving realities of the development process and opposition from Silverstein.
The two architects met in BIG’s conference room alongside Silverstein executives. On the table stood a glowing plastic replica of Two World Trade Center. Ingels demonstrated how the building respected Libeskind’s Wedge of Light plaza and displayed renderings of the lobby, where diagonal columns solved the challenge of aligning structural supports with Foster’s foundation.
"We get an almost Libeskind-esque language," Ingels said, "defined simply by connecting the dots."
Libeskind delivered his verdict with a firm slap on the table: "Congratulations, that is a super building." Then, with a touch of mischief, he turned to Silverstein executive Janno Lieber and added, "I hope we’re going to see it going up, Mr. Janno."
Initial reviews following the June 9 unveiling were largely positive, but as Libeskind noted, that was only the easy part. To make the model real, an architect must navigate the complex realities of economics, power brokers, and politicians.
Despite the progress, elements of the design remained in flux, and the building even acquired an unexpected critic in Douglas Durst, operator of the adjacent One World Trade Center. "I’m very disappointed in Bjarke’s design," Durst said, citing objections to the orientation of the stepped gardens. "He turned his back on our building. Not even metaphorically. It’s very disrespectful."
At the same time, Durst maintained that Ingels was a genius, illustrating the delicate balance of architectural success in a competitive market where every client expects undivided attention.
As BIG continued to expand, taking on high-profile projects such as the Dryline flood defense system in Manhattan and a master plan for the Smithsonian’s South Mall campus in Washington, DC, Ingels remained deeply hands-on. Whether revising concrete samples for residential facades or brainstorming pavilion designs for Brooklyn waterfront parks, he treated architecture as an ongoing exercise in problem-solving.
Reflecting on his journey from Copenhagen to the center of the American architectural establishment, Ingels embraced the pragmatic boundaries of his profession. "A lot of the starchitects have started their careers doing some high-end sculptural projects," he observed. "When they suddenly get faced with something that is more governed by the parameters of the practical, they end up almost petrified or paralyzed, because their usual repertoire doesn’t work."
Instead, Ingels viewed the challenge of realizing his skyscraper design as solving a gigantic equation with multiple variables. Walking down Greenwich Street toward the World Trade Center site, he framed a view with his hands and smiled.
"Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit," he said. "I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
