On a misty April day, Bjarke Ingels stood on the roof of an old brick building high above a cobblestoned street in Lower Manhattan, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped. The Danish architect was shooting a promotional film for what was then the most important commission of his young career: his 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 media magnate Rupert Murdoch—had yet to formally sign off. Yet the hyper-eloquent 40-year-old architect did not let doubt stand in the way of his video introduction. Having obsessed over every line and image, he told his director that he wanted viewers to swoon. At that moment, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his media 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, 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 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 rings two cascading pools that pay tribute to the roughly 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Ingels, however, was not preoccupied with that somber history—he wanted to make his own.
"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 built a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen featuring a slanted roof that doubles 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—along with 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, "we still haven’t 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—one that turns a form fundamentally vertical and hierarchical into a place for horizontal interaction. Then 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, which would allow 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, the lumbering transportation agency that owns the land beneath the Trade Center buildings.
For 14 years, these factors conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, leveling many an architectural ambition. Ingels’ design actually displaced an earlier one by Lord Norman Foster. (Turnabout is fair play: Foster had similarly pushed aside Ingels on a previous project, a national library in Kazakhstan.) To avoid his predecessor’s fate, Ingels had to balance the sometimes conflicting demands of Murdoch and Silverstein, who planned to market the top half of the building as office space. And he had to do it while juggling all the other important clients who had recently showered business on BIG. Ingels’ dazzlingly swift rise inspired much awe and envy among his peers. Just as one triumphant building can make an architect’s reputation, though, it takes only one disaster to ruin it.
Ingels, never short on bravado, said he relished the pressure. "It is like this Zen exercise," he explained. "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. He worried the stacked structure would look asymmetrical, even teetering, from certain perspectives.
"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. But that day on the roof, Ingels confided that he had just heard Rupert Murdoch wanted to review the latest version of the design.
The following Monday, the principals gathered in a conference room overlooking the site. Usually unflappable, Ingels was knocked off balance by the combative Australian’s rapid-fire questioning.
"It’s almost sort of like kangaroo boxing," Ingels said hours afterward, back at his office.
Murdoch’s deepest concern amounted to a fundamental physics question: Why doesn’t it fall over? With assistance from David Childs, the courtly architect of One World Trade Center, Ingels explained to his client that the leaning effect was an illusion. The unorthodox stepped form of the building resulted from placing the inner core—which houses a high-rise’s crucial component, elevators—in an off-center position. This layout produced 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 said. "The more blatantly the architect can explain why things are the way they are, the better."
In his efforts, Ingels counted on at least one powerful ally: James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. It was James who served as the moving force behind the decision to relocate his father’s companies, 21st Century Fox and News Corp., from an aging building near Rockefeller Center.
"It was funny," James recalled. "We sort of thought, ‘Let’s not hire a starchitect, let’s not build a big tower.’"
He initially wanted to create 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, but one who understood his desires.
"We were struck by what a great problem solver he was," James said. "This is someone who can take a set of constraints and create something surprising and effective out of them."
The foremost constraint involved Foster, or rather the remnants of his design. As the result of a political compromise between Silverstein and the Port Authority, Foster’s foundation had already been constructed to allow the completion of a $4 billion underground transportation hub. The rest of the tower was to be built once Silverstein secured a major anchor tenant. But James did not think Foster’s stodgy skyscraper suited a media company’s needs. Ingels was similarly dismissive, calling the design "a generic extrusion with a flashy hat."
Piggybacking a new skyscraper onto Foster’s foundation, however, 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. Whatever Ingels wanted to create high in the air had to connect to what was already set deep in the ground.
Ten days after Ingels’ meeting with Murdoch, back at BIG’s chaotic, half-boxed offices prior to a move into a larger space, the architect dug up a marker and began drawing on a whiteboard.
"A lot of towers, as they get over a certain height, they tend toward a square footprint," Ingels explained.
This generic form is dictated by cost, marketing—uniform floor plates are easier to lease—and engineering, as a skyscraper must withstand huge forces of gravity and wind. But Ingels believed he had figured out how to shape his skyscraper differently.
"We just redistributed the calories," he said.
Just then, Ute Rinnebach, his project manager for Two World Trade Center, hurtle back into the office after meeting with the engineers.
"How did it go?" Ingels asked.
"Really bad," Rinnebach said. "I’ve got some horrible news for you."
Ingels’ idea for retrofitting the foundation involved shoring up walls and columns underground in the Port Authority’s domain, which proved to be forbidden. Like a Jenga block, taking away that crucial bit of reinforcement could potentially cause the whole structural scheme to fail. Furthermore, a facade consultant delivered another crushing blow: New York Police Department security standards required all facades at the World Trade Center to be laminated safety glass, making them heavier and driving up costs by $60 million compared to Foster’s design.
"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’s negotiations at a tense juncture, departures from rote formulas were heavily penalized in cost estimates. For a few weeks, the fate of the project remained in serious doubt. But Ingels eventually averted disaster by agreeing to painful structural changes.
Walking briskly toward his Tribeca apartment one day in May, he noted an impromptu visit from Silverstein.
"He said, ‘You know, this is a historical moment, we can make this happen. We need to make this deal happen, and to do that, we need to make the design happen. There are these outstanding issues, and you, my friend, are the one who can solve them,’" Ingels recounted.
By early June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch was in place, and the parties felt confident enough to publicly unveil the design for Two World Trade Center. Before that, however, Ingels had to seek a final blessing from a fellow architect: Daniel Libeskind, the original master planner for the site.
One morning, Silverstein executives joined the two architects in BIG’s conference room. On the table stood a glowing plastic replica of Two World Trade Center. Ingels took care to show how the building respected Libeskind’s Wedge of Light plaza and solved foundation alignment challenges through diagonal columns.
Libeskind gave his verdict with a slap on the table. "Congratulations, that is a super building," he said, adding with a touch of mischief to Janno Lieber: "I hope we’re going to see it going up, Mr. Janno."
Initial reviews of the design following its June 9 unveiling were largely positive, though the complex realities of economics, society, power brokers, and politicians meant many elements remained in flux. The building’s height eventually shrank by 90 feet, and the project even acquired an unexpected critic in Douglas Durst, operator of the neighboring One World Trade Center, who disliked the orientation of the stepped gardens.
Yet, as BIG continued to expand—taking on projects like the Dryline flood defense system in Manhattan and a master plan for the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.—Ingels remained confident in his pragmatic yet utopian philosophy.
Back at BIG’s new top-floor offices on Broadway overlooking the financial district, Ingels welcomed his staff with a midmorning champagne toast, celebrating a workload that included a second 1,200-foot Manhattan skyscraper.
"A lot of starchitects have started their careers doing some high-end sculptural projects," Ingels reflected. "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, the challenge of realizing his skyscraper design remains an ongoing puzzle of solving a gigantic equation with multiple variables. Stepping out into the sunny Manhattan morning and gesturing toward the World Trade Center site, he offered a characteristic evaluation of where his latest vision was heading.
"Imagine, that’s where it’s going to sit," he said. "I think it’s going to be pretty epic."
