On a misty April day in Lower Manhattan, Danish architect 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 40-year-old architect is shooting a promotional film for the most important commission of his young career: his daring design for Two World Trade Center.
The project is still a work in progress, and his primary client—media magnate Rupert Murdoch—has yet to formally sign off. Yet Ingels does not let doubt stand in his way. Having obsessed over every line and image, he tells his director that he wants viewers to swoon. At this moment, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his companies is still one of New York real estate’s best-kept secrets, but Ingels can hardly wait to shout the news 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 vantage point, 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 piece in the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center. 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 is not preoccupied with the past—he wants to make his own history.
"The memorial is about the memorial," he tells me. "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 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 and 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—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. Still, 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 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, adding, "We still haven’t completed a skyscraper."
With Two World Trade Center, Ingels believes he has devised a way to create a new kind of high-rise work environment—one that transforms a form fundamentally vertical and hierarchical into a place for horizontal interaction. Now comes the laborious part: proving he can turn 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 vision, however, Ingels must continually prove its value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Rupert Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the developer who has controlled much of the World Trade Center rebuilding. Murdoch and Silverstein still need to agree on a long-term lease, a crucial step to financing the $4 billion skyscraper.
"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 reach an agreement, other hazards loom: a volatile real estate market, the political melodrama inherent in building on a site of mass murder, and an often irrational bureaucracy embodied by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency that owns the underlying land.
For 14 years, these factors have conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, upending many an architectural ambition. In fact, Ingels’ design displaced an earlier one by Lord Norman Foster. Turnabout is fair play, as Foster had previously pushed aside Ingels on a national library project in Kazakhstan. To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels must balance the conflicting demands of Murdoch and Silverstein, who will market the top half of the building as office space. At the same time, he must juggle a wave of new clients who have recently hired his rapidly expanding firm. Ingels’ dazzlingly swift rise inspires awe and envy among his peers, but in architecture, it takes only one disaster to ruin a hard-won reputation.
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 and teetering from certain perspectives. Silverstein nearly rejected the entire deal until an endorsement from the architects of other World Trade Center buildings changed his mind.
The following Monday, the principals gathered in a conference room overlooking the site. Unflappable by nature, Ingels was momentarily knocked off balance by Murdoch’s rapid-fire questioning.
"It’s almost sort of like kangaroo boxing," Ingels says hours afterward.
Murdoch’s chief concern was simple: Why doesn’t it fall over? With assistance from David Childs, the architect of One World Trade Center, Ingels explained that the leaning effect is an optical illusion. The unorthodox stepped form stems from placing the inner core—which houses crucial elevators—in an off-center position, creating expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, 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 says. "The more blatantly the architect can explain why things are the way they are, the better."
Ingels also counted on a powerful ally: James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. It was James, 42, who spearheaded the process of deciding whether to relocate 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 recalls.
He initially wanted an open, loftlike creative workplace. But after exploring potential sites, he arrived at the World Trade Center—and at 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."
The foremost constraint involved the remnants of Foster’s design. As a political compromise between Silverstein and the Port Authority, Foster’s foundation had already been built to accommodate a $4 billion underground transportation hub. But James did not think 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 created tricky structural problems, especially on the lower floors, which had to shift the tower’s weight onto preexisting supports. Ten days after meeting with Murdoch, Ingels is back at his chaotic office before a move to a larger space. Grabbing a marker, he begins sketching on a whiteboard.
"A lot of towers, as they get over a certain height, tend toward a square footprint," Ingels explains, noting that uniform floor plates are cheaper and easier to lease. But Ingels believes he can shape his skyscraper differently. "We just redistributed the calories," he says.
Suddenly, Ute Rinnebach, his project manager for Two World Trade Center, bursts into the office just back from meeting with engineers.
"How did it go?" Ingels asks.
"Really bad," Rinnebach replies. "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 turns out to be forbidden. Removing that reinforcement could cause the structural scheme to fail. Furthermore, a facade consultant delivers another blow: New York Police Department security standards require all facades at the World Trade Center to be made of heavier laminated safety glass to guard against explosions, dashing Ingels’ plans to use thinner, cheaper glass panels to save $60 million.
"I was like, fuck!" Ingels admits. "Because that’s a piece of information that hadn’t reached me."
With Silverstein and Murdoch navigating a tense bargaining juncture, any departure from standard formulas drives up construction estimates.
"Right now," Ingels says, "the architecture is essentially held hostage."
For weeks, the project’s fate remains in doubt. But after agreeing to several painful structural changes, Ingels manages to preserve the design’s core identity. Walking across the World Trade Center plaza with Silverstein executive Janno Lieber, Ingels receives an encouraging embrace.
"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."
Reflecting on the hurdles, Ingels draws on an evolutionary metaphor.
"In Darwinian evolution, the animal has two primary instincts, right? Fight or flight," he says. "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."
This evolutionary mindset helps Ingels accept an unfortunate truth: an architect 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, allowing him to partner with clients wielding immense financial and political sway. Google, for instance, encouraged him to let his imagination run wild—CEO Larry Page once told him regarding parking constraints, "It’s nothing that $50 million won’t solve." Even so, the city of Mountain View ultimately denied development rights for the entire 2.5 million-square-foot complex, proving that even tech giants get told no.
Press coverage of that setback was overblown, and Google is proceeding with at least one domed building. Meanwhile, more work flows into BIG daily. In Manhattan, Ingels is 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, DC, he is working on a master plan for the Smithsonian’s South Mall campus, while also exploring stadium projects.
"Coming here to America five years ago, we were given the opportunity to try to reimagine the skyscraper, which is one of the great inventions of American architecture," Ingels says.
Having founded BIG in Copenhagen just a decade ago, his meteoric rise has confounded industry expectations.
"He has just bypassed all the rest of the avant-garde," says Preston Scott Cohen, an acclaimed architect and Harvard professor. "No one has done it that fast, with that degree of success."
Ingels aspires to be a different kind of architectural star, one who bridges the gap between pragmatic corporate architecture and imaginative design. Influenced by his early mentor Rem Koolhaas, Ingels shares a desire to leave a tangible mark on New York City, a place Koolhaas wrote about extensively but never built in.
By early June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch is in place, enabling the public unveiling of Two World Trade Center. Before that, however, Ingels must seek a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the architect behind the World Trade Center master plan. Libeskind’s initial triumph in New York a decade ago eventually ran up against the unforgiving realities of the development process, offering a cautionary tale.
During a presentation at BIG’s conference room, Ingels showcases a glowing model of Two World Trade Center, carefully demonstrating how the building respects Libeskind’s "Wedge of Light" plaza. Libeskind inspects the model and delivers his verdict with a slap on the table.
"Congratulations, that is a super building," he says, adding with a touch of mischief: "I hope we’re going to see it going up, Mr. Janno."
Initial reviews following the June 9 unveiling are positive, but Libeskind offers a reminder of the road ahead.
"Between that first smile and the last stone is the challenge of architecture," Libeskind notes, pointing to the complex interplay of economics, society, power brokers, and politicians.
As negotiations and design tweaks continue, even Douglas Durst—operator of the neighboring One World Trade Center—voices disappointment with the orientation of Ingels’ stepped gardens, illustrating the tightrope walk of pleasing multiple stakeholders in high-profile developments.
Yet, back at BIG’s new top-floor offices on Broadway, looking out toward the World Trade Center, Ingels remains unfazed. Surrounded by a growing team of young international architects, he pops champagne, listens to Frank Sinatra’s "New York, New York," and looks ahead to the next epic challenge.
"A lot of the starchitects have started their careers doing some high-end sculptural projects," Ingels says over breakfast in Tribeca. "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."
For Ingels, success lies in embracing those very parameters—solving a giant equation with multiple variables to turn fiction into fact.
"Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit," he says, making a camera shutter motion with his hands as he looks toward the Trade Center site. "I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
