On a misty April day in Lower Manhattan, Danish architect 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 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 architect refused to 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 the time, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his companies was one of New York real estate’s biggest secrets, but Ingels could not wait to share the news. Between takes, he 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 stand among the tallest buildings in New York City and serve as the final addition to the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center site. The ensemble of structures rings two cascading pools honoring the roughly 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. But Ingels 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."
Eclecticism on Demand
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 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, Ingels—along with collaborator Thomas Heatherwick—envisioned a wildly elaborate 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. But 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 striking pyramidal apartment building under construction along Manhattan’s West Side Highway at 57th Street, was 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 found 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. Next came the laborious part: proving he was capable of transforming that captivating story into hard facts on the ground.
Navigating Power and Politics
To realize his design, Ingels continually had to 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 had to agree on a long-term lease that would allow the $4 billion skyscraper to be financed.
"There’s a lot of drama with the deal right now," Ingels said on the day of the film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be."
Even if the parties reached an agreement, other hazards remained: a volatile real estate market, the political melodrama inherent in building on a site of mass murder, and an often inflexible government 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 conspired to keep the redevelopment process lurching along unpredictably, leveling many architectural ambitions. Ingels’ design actually displaced an earlier concept by Lord Norman Foster. 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, while juggling other major clients who had recently showered business on his firm, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).
The first force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center was inertia. Silverstein believed he had a perfectly good design from Foster and expressed serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings, fearing the stacked structure would look asymmetrical or teetering from certain perspectives. Silverstein almost rejected the deal entirely until receiving endorsements from the architects of other World Trade Center buildings.
Shortly after, Ingels faced a rigorous grilling from Rupert Murdoch himself during a conference room meeting overlooking the site. Murdoch’s primary concern boiled down to a fundamental 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 the 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 convinced.
In his efforts, Ingels counted on a powerful ally: James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. As the driving force behind the relocation of 21st Century Fox and News Corp. from an aging building near Rockefeller Center, the younger Murdoch sought an open, loftlike, creative workplace. "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."
Engineering Challenges and Compromises
The foremost constraint involved the remnants of Foster’s previous design. As part 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 that existing 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 roadblock in the Port Authority’s domain. Altering those reinforcements risked destabilizing the entire structural scheme.
Further complications arose regarding the facade. To offset rising costs, Ingels initially considered using thinner glass for parts of the building. However, New York Police Department security standards required all facades at the World Trade Center to be laminated safety glass, making them heavier and more expensive.
"I was like, fuck!" Ingels recalled. "Because that’s a piece of information that hadn’t reached me. I thought I had an ace up my sleeve, which I didn’t, because the building has to be safe from explosions."
As Silverstein and Murdoch negotiated through a tense juncture, any departure from standard architectural formulas threatened to inflate construction costs, effectively holding the architecture hostage. Yet through painstaking structural adjustments, Ingels managed to preserve the core integrity of his design.
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 reveal, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the master planner for the site whose own initial prominence had run up against the harsh realities of the New York development process.
During a presentation at BIG’s conference room, Ingels showed how the building respected Libeskind’s Wedge of Light plaza and resolved foundation alignment challenges using diagonal columns. Libeskind offered his approval with a slap on the table: "Congratulations, that is a super building."
Initial public reviews of the design were largely positive, though challenges remained. Douglas Durst, operator of the neighboring One World Trade Center, voiced strong objections, criticizing the orientation of the stepped gardens for turning its back on his building. Nevertheless, Durst acknowledged Ingels’ overall brilliance.
Expanding Horizons
As BIG expanded to include offices in New York and Copenhagen, handling major international projects ranging from the Smithsonian’s South Mall campus master plan to climate defense systems along the East River, Ingels continued to embrace the pragmatic boundaries of his profession.
Reflecting on his rapid ascent, Ingels remained philosophical about the hurdles of his field. "In architecture, sometimes the eureka moment is actually when you give up a stance and say, OK, we have to try something else," he said.
With a 1,200-foot tower taking shape in Lower Manhattan and numerous other high-profile commissions underway, Bjarke Ingels set out to prove that imaginative, avant-garde architecture could successfully conquer the practical demands of the modern corporate skyline.
