On a misty April day in Lower Manhattan, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels stood on the roof of an old brick building high above a cobblestoned street, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped. The 40-year-old designer was shooting a promotional film for what is arguably 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—media magnate Rupert Murdoch—had yet to formally sign off. Yet Ingels, hyper-eloquent and relentlessly optimistic, refused to let doubt stall his vision. He had obsessed over every line and image, telling his director that he wanted viewers to swoon. At this moment, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his corporate empire was one of New York real estate’s best-kept secrets, but Ingels could not wait to share the news.
Between takes, Ingels pointed to a void in the densely packed Manhattan skyline, tracing the profile of a skyscraper that, for the moment, 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 mark the final piece of the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center site. 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. But Ingels was not preoccupied with mourning; 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, 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 oversaw the construction of a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen featuring a slanted roof that serves 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 wild 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 often takes years to materialize. Ingels’ largest project to date at the time, a pyramidal apartment building along Manhattan’s West Side Highway at 57th Street known as Via 57 West, was 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 acknowledged, noting that his firm had yet to complete a skyscraper. With Two World Trade Center, he believed he had found a way to create a high-rise work environment that turned a fundamentally vertical, hierarchical form into a place for horizontal interaction. The laborious part, however, was proving he could transform that story into reality.
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 for Two World Trade Center, Ingels had to continually prove its value to a pair of hard-nosed figures: Rupert Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the developer who has controlled much of the World Trade Center rebuilding. Murdoch and Silverstein had 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 his film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be."
Even if the parties reached an agreement, other hazards loomed: a volatile real estate market, the political melodrama inherent in building on a site of mass tragedy, and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency that owns the land beneath the complex. For 14 years, these factors had conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, leveling many architectural ambitions. Ingels’ design had actually displaced an earlier one by Lord Norman Foster. To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had to balance the conflicting demands of Murdoch and Silverstein while juggling clients who had recently showered business on his rapidly expanding firm.
The first force Ingels had to overcome was inertia. Silverstein initially favored Foster’s design and expressed serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings, fearing the stacked structure would appear asymmetrical or teetering from certain perspectives. Silverstein almost rejected the deal entirely until receiving endorsements from the architects of other World Trade Center buildings.
Soon after, Ingels faced Rupert Murdoch directly in a conference room overlooking the site. Unflappable under normal circumstances, Ingels was momentarily knocked off balance by the media mogul’s rapid-fire questioning. 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 elevators—in an off-center position, creating expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, views of the plaza for Fox News studios, and outdoor terraces. Murdoch was ultimately sold.
Ingels also found a powerful ally in James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. It was James who drove the decision to relocate 21st Century Fox and News Corp. from an aging building near Rockefeller Center, seeking an open, loftlike, creative workplace rather than a traditional corporate tower.
Overcoming Engineering and Political Hurdles
Despite winning over his tenants and developers, Ingels faced a major physical constraint involving the remnants of Lord Norman Foster’s previous design. As 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 foundation created tricky structural problems, especially on the lower floors, which had to shift the tower’s weight onto preexisting supports.
Days after meeting with Murdoch, Ingels learned from his project manager, Ute Rinnebach, that retrofitting the foundation by shoring up underground walls within the Port Authority’s domain was prohibited. Like a Jenga block, removing crucial reinforcement threatened 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, increasing weight and eliminating potential cost-saving measures he had planned.
As Silverstein and Murdoch navigated tense lease negotiations, any departure from standard construction formulas faced steep cost scrutiny. For weeks, the fate of the project remained in doubt. Yet Ingels eventually negotiated a series of structural compromises that kept the design intact. Janno Lieber, Silverstein’s second-in-command, later praised the firm’s turnaround, telling Ingels that his team had successfully solved the intricate equation.
By early June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch was in place, allowing the design to be publicly unveiled. Before the public announcement, Ingels sought a blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the architect who authored the overall master plan for the World Trade Center site. Following a presentation in BIG’s conference room featuring a glowing model of the tower, Libeskind gave his approval, calling it a "super building."
Initial reviews following the June 9 unveiling were largely positive, though the tower’s design continued to evolve, shrinking slightly in height. Douglas Durst, operator of the neighboring One World Trade Center, emerged as a notable critic, expressing disappointment over the orientation of the stepped gardens. Nevertheless, the project demonstrated BIG’s growing capacity to navigate the complex intersection of architecture, economics, and politics.
As BIG expanded—opening a new office on Broadway near Wall Street that housed hundreds of employees—Ingels continued to manage multiple high-profile commissions simultaneously, including waterfront flood defenses known as the Dryline in Manhattan and a master plan for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. Reflecting on his rapid ascent, Ingels remained focused on the practical realities of his profession.
"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. "A lot of the starchitects have started their careers doing some high-end sculptural projects. 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."
With the Two World Trade Center design moving forward and numerous projects shaping skylines around the world, Ingels embraced the challenge of solving large-scale urban equations, proving that imaginative design could thrive within the pragmatic boundaries of the modern city.
