On a misty April morning 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 40-year-old Danish architect was shooting a promotional film for the defining commission of his young career: his unconventional design for Two World Trade Center.
At the time, the project remained 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 impede his vision. He had obsessed over every line and image, instructing his director that he wanted viewers to swoon. Murdoch’s plan to relocate his corporate empire was still one of New York real estate’s closely guarded secrets, but Ingels was ready 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, for the moment, only he could see. From that specific perspective, his proposed design resembled a stack of seven distinct blocks, ascending like a grand staircase toward One World Trade Center, its monolithic neighbor.
"In a way, it is almost like a physical manifestation of the spirit of America," Ingels said. "Out of many, one."
If completed, the tower would stand among the tallest buildings in New York City and serve as the final structure envisioned in the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center. The architectural ensemble rings two cascading pools that pay tribute to the roughly 3,000 people who lost their lives in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Ingels, however, was not preoccupied with replicating the somber tone of the memorial. He wanted to make his own history.
"The memorial is about the memorial," Ingels noted. "The tower should be about the living city."
Eclecticism on Demand
Ingels is fond of describing architecture as "the art of turning fiction into fact." He possesses 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 innate ability to construct a compelling narrative around pragmatic necessities.
Often, his designs careen in fantastical directions. He engineered 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, designed in collaboration with Thomas Heatherwick, Ingels envisioned a wildly elaborate complex of geodesic domes, offering 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 conservative standards of traditional architecture. Yet fame can be a deceptive indicator in his profession, where an architect’s work, much like the light of a distant star, often reaches the public eye only after a years-long journey.
Ingels’ largest completed project in New York at the time, a striking pyramidal apartment building along the 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, adding, "we still haven’t completed a skyscraper."
With Two World Trade Center, Ingels believed he had discovered a way to reinvent the high-rise work environment, transforming a form that is fundamentally vertical and hierarchical into a dynamic space for horizontal interaction. But the captivating story had to be translated into hard facts on the ground.
Playfully calling his firm BIG—and his approach to architecture "BIGamy"—Ingels routinely tailors his ideas to meet rigorous client demands rather than adhering to a single, rigid aesthetic.
Navigating Power and Resistance
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 controlling much of the World Trade Center rebuilding effort. Murdoch and Silverstein had to agree on a complex, long-term lease to finance the $4 billion skyscraper.
"There’s a lot of drama with the deal right now," Ingels remarked on the day of his film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be."
Even if the parties reached an agreement, numerous hazards lay ahead: a volatile real estate market, the political melodrama inherent in building on a site of mass tragedy, and an often inflexible government bureaucracy embodied by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that owns the land beneath the Trade Center complex.
For 14 years, these factors had conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, dashing many architectural ambitions. Ingels’ design had actually displaced an earlier concept by renowned architect Lord Norman Foster. To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had to balance the conflicting demands of Murdoch and Silverstein while juggling a flood of new commissions for his rapidly expanding firm.
The first major force Ingels had to overcome was institutional inertia. Silverstein initially believed he had a superior design from Foster and harbored serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings, fearing the stacked structure would look asymmetrical or teetering from certain angles. Silverstein nearly rejected the entire deal until endorsements 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. Ingels was momentarily knocked off balance by Murdoch’s rapid-fire questioning.
"It’s almost sort of like kangaroo boxing," Ingels said hours later back at his office.
Murdoch’s chief concern was structural stability: 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 optical illusion. The unorthodox stepped form resulted from positioning the core—which houses crucial elevators—off-center, thereby creating expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, views of the plaza for Fox News studios, and outdoor terraces. Murdoch was ultimately convinced.
"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."
Ingels also found a powerful ally in James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. As the driving force behind the decision to relocate 21st Century Fox and News Corp. from an aging building near Rockefeller Center, James sought an open, loftlike, creative workplace rather than a traditional corporate tower. Ultimately, he gravitated toward the World Trade Center and Ingels’ unconventional problem-solving abilities.
Engineering Realities and Cost Pressures
The primary constraint involved the remnants of Foster’s original foundation, which had already been constructed to support an underground transportation hub as part of a political compromise between Silverstein and the Port Authority. Integrating a new skyscraper onto a preexisting foundation created complex structural challenges, particularly on the lower floors, which had to transfer the tower’s immense weight onto old supports.
When Ingels’ team consulted with engineers, they encountered a series of setbacks. Proposals to shore up underground walls within the Port Authority’s domain were rejected, threatening the entire structural scheme. Furthermore, a facade consultant informed Ingels that New York Police Department security standards required all exterior glass at the World Trade Center to be laminated safety glass, increasing the weight and eliminating a planned cost-saving measure that would have shaved $60 million from the budget.
"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."
As negotiations between Silverstein and Murdoch grew tense, any departure from standard construction formulas carried a severe financial penalty. For weeks, the fate of the project remained in doubt as Ingels worked to resolve the engineering and budget issues without completely compromising his design.
Eventually, Ingels accepted several painful structural modifications, preserving the core identity of the tower while appeasing the engineers. Janno Lieber, Silverstein’s second-in-command, praised the turnaround during an impromptu meeting near the site plaza.
"I gotta tell you, I gotta give you a hug," Lieber said. "That was a helluva turnaround that you guys did in the last week."
Expanding Ambitions and a Rapid Ascent
As BIG continued to expand, taking on high-profile projects like the Smithsonian South Mall campus master plan, Google’s Mountain View campus, and the Dryline flood defense system in New York, Ingels’ trajectory confounded industry expectations.
"He has just bypassed all the rest of the avant-garde," said 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."
While traditional museum-grade architecture has long been limited to specialized civic projects, Ingels has sought to bring artistic ambition to profit-driven office buildings and megaprojects. Tracing his lineage back to Rem Koolhaas’s firm OMA, where Ingels worked as an intern, he inherited a fearless attitude toward putting unconventional ideas on the table.
By June, a tentative lease agreement between Silverstein and Murdoch was finalized, paving the way for the public unveiling of Two World Trade Center. Before the announcement, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the master planner for the World Trade Center site.
Standing before a glowing plastic model of the tower in BIG’s conference room, Ingels demonstrated how his design respected Libeskind’s original master plan, including the Wedge of Light plaza. Libeskind gave his approval with a decisive slap on the table.
"Congratulations, that is a super building," Libeskind said, adding a cautionary note about the realities of the development process: "Between that first smile and the last stone is the challenge of architecture."
Despite initial positive reviews following the June 9 unveiling, elements of the design remained in flux, and the building’s height eventually shrank by 90 feet. Douglas Durst, operator of the neighboring One World Trade Center, voiced sharp disappointment with the orientation of the stepped gardens, illustrating the intense rivalries and high stakes of Lower Manhattan real estate development.
Yet as BIG settled into its spacious new headquarters on Broadway, overlooking the very skyline it was rapidly transforming, Ingels remained characteristically unfazed by the mounting pressures.
"Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit," Ingels said, framing a view of the World Trade Center site with his hands. "I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
