On a misty April day in Lower Manhattan, Bjarke Ingels stood high above a cobblestoned street on the roof of an old brick building, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped. The Danish architect was 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 was still a work in progress, and his primary client—media magnate Rupert Murdoch—had yet to sign off. Yet the hyper-eloquent 40-year-old let no doubt stand in the way of his video introduction. He had obsessed over every line and image, telling his director that he wanted viewers to swoon. At that moment, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his companies was still one of New York real estate’s biggest secrets, but Ingels could not wait to shout the news, quite literally, 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, Ingels’ 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 be 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 would ring two cascading pools paying tribute to the roughly 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Ingels, however, was not preoccupied with 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."
Ingels is fond of saying that architecture is "the art of turning fiction into fact." He boasts many talents—as a draftsman, as a salesman, and as 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 helped build a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen with a slanted roof serving as a recreational ski slope and 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, alongside 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, like the light of a star, only reaches the eye after a years-long journey. 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, noting that his firm still had not completed a skyscraper. With Two World Trade Center, Ingels believed he had imagined 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.
Eclecticism on Demand
Ingels playfully calls his firm BIG, and his approach to architecture BIGamy. Rather than adhere to a single aesthetic, he tailors his ideas to meet client demands—all in service of designs unlike anything seen before.
To realize his design, Ingels 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, allowing 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.
For 14 years, these factors had conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, leveling many an architectural ambition. Ingels’ design had 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, who would be marketing the top half of the building as office space, while juggling other major clients. Ingels, never short on bravado, said he relished the pressure, comparing it to a Zen exercise of 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 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 until an endorsement from the architects of other World Trade Center buildings changed his mind. Soon after, Ingels learned that Rupert Murdoch wanted to review the latest version of the design.
The following Monday, the principals gathered in a conference room overlooking the site. Ingels was knocked off balance by the combative Australian’s rapid-fire questioning, likening the experience to kangaroo boxing. Murdoch’s deepest concern amounted to a simple 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 illusion. The unorthodox stepped form resulted from placing the inner core—which houses crucial elevators—in an off-center position, producing expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, views of the plaza from Fox News studios, and outdoor terraces. Murdoch was sold.
Ingels also counted on a powerful ally in James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. James was the moving 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 and his team ultimately arrived at the World Trade Center and chose Ingels because he understood their desire for a functional, problem-solving approach.
Yet, a major constraint involved the remnants of Lord Norman Foster’s 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. Piggybacking a new skyscraper onto Foster’s 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 underground walls and columns, he hit a wall: the Port Authority ruled it out, as altering the reinforcement could destabilize the entire structural scheme. Furthermore, a facade consultant informed Ingels that New York Police Department security standards required all facades at the World Trade Center to be laminated safety glass, rendering them heavier and more expensive than initially planned. With Silverstein and Murdoch navigating a tense bargaining juncture, every departure from a standard formula carried a heavy construction-cost penalty.
Despite the hurdles, Ingels pressed forward, working closely with his project manager Ute Rinnebach and engineering teams to resolve massing and structural challenges without compromising the core aesthetic. By early June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch was in place, allowing the parties to publicly unveil the design for Two World Trade Center.
Before the public unveiling, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, who laid out the master plan for the new World Trade Center complex. Inside BIG’s conference room, Ingels presented a glowing model of Two World Trade Center, taking care to show how the building respected Libeskind’s Wedge of Light plaza and solved structural alignment challenges using diagonal columns. Libeskind rendered his verdict with a slap on the table: "Congratulations, that is a super building."
Initial reviews of the design were largely positive, though challenges remained. Douglas Durst, the developer of One World Trade Center next door, voiced public disappointment with the orientation of the stepped gardens, illustrating the complex dynamics of high-stakes Manhattan real estate. Nevertheless, BIG continued to expand its footprint, taking on high-profile projects including the Dryline flood defense system in New York, the Smithsonian South Mall Campus master plan in Washington, D.C., and ongoing residential and commercial developments.
As BIG grew to encompass hundreds of employees across New York and Copenhagen, Ingels embraced the role of brand ambassador while remaining deeply hands-on in the creative process. Reflecting on his rapid ascent and the pragmatic realities of modern architecture, Ingels remained philosophical about the hurdles of his profession. Solving a major architectural commission, he often noted, was akin to solving a gigantic equation with multiple variables—requiring an architect to navigate the demands of economics, power brokers, and society while still striving to make something extraordinary out of the ordinary.
