Left: Bjarke Ingels front and center at the World Trade Center in New York City. Right: Ingels at the site of a proposed office complex for Google in Mountain View, California.
n a misty April day, Bjarke Ingels is standing 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 is shooting a promotional film about the most important commission of his young career, his design for the skyscraper known as Two World Trade Center. It is still a work in progress, and his primary client—the imperious media magnate Rupert Murdoch—has yet to sign off. The hyper-eloquent 40-year-old isn’t letting doubt stand in the way of his video introduction, though: He has obsessed over every line and image, telling 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 biggest secrets. But Ingels can’t wait to shout the news, quite literally, 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 sees. From this perspective, Ingels’ 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 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 will ring two cascading pools that pay tribute to the roughly 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Ingels is not preoccupied with that—he wants to make his own history. “The memorial is about the memorial,” he tells me. “The tower should be about the living city.”
he first force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center was inertia. Silverstein thought he had a perfectly good design from Foster—who declined to comment for this article—and the developer had serious concerns about Ingels’ early drawings. He was scared the stacked structure would look asymmetrical—even teetering—from certain perspectives. “He just thought, like, could he see it fit in? No,” Ingels recalls. “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 confides that he has just heard that Rupert Murdoch wants to review the latest version of the design.
The following Monday, the principals all 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 says hours afterward, back at his office. Murdoch’s deepest concern, according to multiple sources, amounted to: Why doesn’t it fall over? With some assistance from David Childs, the courtly architect of One World Trade Center, Ingels explained to his client that the leaning effect is 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, which would produce 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 tells me. “The more blatantly the architect can explain why things are the way they are, the better.”
In his efforts, Ingels was able to count on at least one powerful ally: James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. It was James, 42, who was the moving force behind the process of deciding whether to relocate his father’s companies, 21st Century Fox and News Corp., from an aging building near Rockefeller Center. “It was funny,” James says. “We sort of thought, ‘Let’s not hire a starchitect, let’s not build a big tower.’” He wanted to create an open, loftlike, creative workplace. But after an extended exploration of potential sites, he ended up at the World Trade Center. And with Ingels: a star, but one who understood his desires. “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.”
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Two World Trade Center | The 80-plus-story building will be the final addition to the revitalized World Trade Center, framing the 9/11 Memorial park alongside three other skyscrapers. From some perspectives, it will appear as though the high-rise leans toward One WTC—a reference to the Twin Towers that formerly stood across the street from the site. The eastern face takes a stepped form whose horizontal shape allows for expansive interior spaces and outdoor terraces. Big Bjarke Ingels Group
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 didn’t 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 the lower floors, which would have to be engineered to shift the tower’s weight onto the preexisting supports. Whatever Ingels wanted to create high in the air would have to connect to what was already set deep in the ground. So, after winning over the developer and his anchor tenant, Ingels would have to convince yet another skeptical audience: Silverstein’s engineers. Ten days after Ingels’ meeting with Murdoch, I return to BIG’s offices, where everything is chaotic and half boxed; in a few days the firm is moving to a larger space. Ingels is in his usual state of chic dishevelment, his hair mussed, his face lightly browned with stubble. He digs up a marker and begins drawing on a whiteboard. “A lot of towers, as they get over a certain height, they tend toward a square footprint,” Ingels explains. This generic form is dictated by cost, marketing—uniform floor plates are easier to lease—and engineering. A skyscraper must withstand huge forces of gravity and wind. But Ingels thinks he has figured out how to shape his skyscraper differently. “We just redistributed the calories,” he says.
Ingels looks up from his board to see Ute Rinnebach, his project manager for Two World Trade Center, hurtle into the office. She is just back from meeting with the engineers.
“How did it go?” Ingels asks.
“Really bad,” Rinnebach says. “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 turns out to be verboten. Like a Jenga block, taking away that crucial bit of reinforcement could potentially cause the whole structural scheme to fall apart. Ingels darts across the office to consult computer models with his design team. As they start working out solutions, he goes into a meeting with a facade consultant, who delivers yet another crushing bit of news.
Ingels has some complicated ideas about how to vary the alignment of the tower’s glass panes, along with the metal mullions that separate them. To bring down the price of the facade, which consultants said was running $60 million more than Foster’s, Ingels thought that he could use a thinner product for parts of the building. But the consultant informs him that New York Police Department security standards require all facades at the World Trade Center to be laminated safety glass, which makes them heavier. “I was like, fuck!” Ingels tells me later. “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.”
Silverstein and Murdoch have reached a tense juncture in their bargaining, and anything departing from rote formula is being assigned a premium in construction-cost estimates. “Right now,” Ingels says, “the architecture is essentially held hostage.”
For a few weeks, the fate of the project is very much in doubt. “It’s trying to resolve all these issues without totally bastardizing the design,” Ingels tells me one day in May. Walking briskly toward his Tribeca apartment, where he has to pack for a trip to Cannes, he says he recently received 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.’” The engineers were still fixated on the massing—the shape and size of the building. “At some point, everybody gets a little nervous about the whole thing,” Ingels says, “and drastic solutions go on the table.”
Photo by: Dan Winters
Ingels thinks that he has averted disaster, for now, by agreeing to a number of painful structural changes. “I think it still sort of looks like itself,” he says hopefully. We cut across the World Trade Center plaza, where the architect stops at the lobby window of Four World Trade Center—the sleek new tower designed by Fumihiko Maki—and admires its lobby sculpture, a 98-foot titanium arc. “It has no supports,” Ingels says. “It just cantilevers like a motherfucker.” At this moment, a group of Silverstein Properties executives happens to walk by and relate the encouraging results of a meeting that morning. “I gotta tell you, I gotta give you a hug,” says Janno Lieber, Silverstein’s imposing second-in-command. “That was a helluva turnaround that you guys did in the last week.”
“Suddenly, the sum of a lot of nudges adds up,” Ingels replies.
As we walk away, Ingels says, “That was good, I got a hug from Janno.” Continuing around the site’s eastern perimeter, Ingels picks up our earlier conversation. “I really like this idea that architecture is the art and science of trying to make everybody happy,” he says. “Potentially, somewhere out there, there’s a design that can actually satisfy every dream, by being different.”
We pass the tourists photographing Santiago Calatrava’s outlandishly expensive transit hub, an infamous example of architecture without concessions. “In Darwinian evolution,” Ingels says, “the animal has two primary instincts, right? Fight or flight. And normally you would associate innovation with plowing through and fighting for your standpoint. But often in evolution it is the moment of flight where you are forced to go another route or climb into the tree. Or you’re the fish that escapes on land. You know, you discover new territory. In architecture, sometimes the eureka moment is actually when you give up a stance and say, OK, we have to try something else.”
he evolutionary metaphor is an elegant rationalization of 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 that he produced in his first eight years, only 11 were built. Fame has increased his odds, by allowing him to align himself with clients with money and powerful sway. Google, in particular, encouraged Ingels to let his imagination run wild. (When presented with one problem, involving parking, Ingels says, CEO Larry Page told him: “It’s nothing that $50 million won’t solve.”) But then the city of Mountain View denied the development rights necessary to build the entire 2.5 million-square-foot complex. Even the world’s most important company sometimes gets told no.
Ingels says that press coverage of the setback was overblown; Google is still proceeding with at least one domed building. And there is more work coming BIG’s way every day. In Manhattan alone, Ingels is simultaneously 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, offering a collective opportunity to leave an enormous personal imprint. In Washington, DC, he is working on a master plan for the South Mall campus of the Smithsonian. Each high-profile commission brings BIG to the attention of increasingly important clients—like the NFL franchise owner who recently retained Ingels to work on a stadium project. “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. “I think the American football stadium would be an awesome thing to take on.”
Ingels founded BIG in Copenhagen only a decade ago. In architecture, where careers usually build slowly, through a steady accrual of critical appreciation, his rocketing trajectory has confounded expectations. “He has just bypassed all the rest of the avant-garde,” says Preston Scott Cohen, an acclaimed architect and professor at the Harvard School of Design, where Ingels has also taught. “No one has done it that fast, with that degree of success. You name them, he has just flown right over their heads.”
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Google North Bayshore, Mountain View, CA. Projected Completion: TBD. If built, BIG’s collaboration with Heatherwick Studio would amount to an entirely new neighborhood. The plan envisions a publicly accessible site with underground parking hidden beneath gardens, trails covered by solar canopies to produce green energy, and a public plaza. Google’s offices would be housed beneath glass canopies that can be rearranged as needed for different functions. Big Bjarke Ingels Group
ig’s new offices are on the top floor of an early-20th-century terra-cotta building on Broadway, not far from Wall Street. On their opening day, Ingels strolls in jauntily, grinning as young architects of all nationalities arrange themselves at long desks in the spare loft space. “Where did all these people come from?” he shouts. (BIG now has 170 employees in New York and 100 in Copenhagen.) Ingels shows me to a window, which has a clear view north to the World Trade Center.
“So,” Ingels says, “pretty epic.”
Epic is one of Ingels’ favorite adjectives. He does not often employ understatement, either in his designs or his personal enthusiasms. (While he was shooting a scene for his promo film, a pigeon flew over his shoulder and down the street behind him. “That’s pretty epic!” Ingels exclaimed.) His aura of boyish delight proves useful in wooing clients. “You want to hire somebody in whose orbit you will enjoy being for the three, four, five years you’re going to be working with them,” says Mary Ann Tighe, a top executive at real estate brokerage CBRE, which represents the Murdochs. “He embodies that sense of promise: This is going to be great, this is going to be fun.”
To welcome his staff to their new home, Ingels calls for a midmorning champagne toast. Someone plays Sinatra’s “New York, New York,” and then Ingels gives a speech. He rattles off a list of exciting projects, many of them not yet public, including a second Manhattan skyscraper. “It’s not every day that you do a 1,200-foot tower in New York City,” he quips. “But it feels like every day.”
By early June, a tentative deal between Silverstein and Murdoch is in place, and although many provisions of the long-term lease are still in negotiation, the parties are confident enough to publicly unveil the design for Two World Trade Center. First, however, Ingels has to seek a final blessing from a fellow architect: Daniel Libeskind. Libeskind laid out the master plan for the new World Trade Center complex, and he also provides a cautionary example. A decade ago, he was, like Ingels today, the toast of New York, before he ran into the unforgiving realities of the development process—principally opposition from Silverstein. His hopes to play a lead role in designing One World Trade Center were thwarted amid public acrimony, though Libeskind’s master plan remains the template for the whole site.
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With several epic projects under way, Bjarke Ingels is set to transform Manhattan’s skyline and shoreline. DBOX
That conflict seems forgotten now, at least superficially, so one morning Silverstein executives join the two architects, both dressed all in black, for a presentation in BIG’s conference room. On the table stands a large plastic replica of Two World Trade Center, glowing from within. Ingels takes care to show how the building respects one of Libeskind’s beloved features, a plaza called the Wedge of Light, and displays a rendering of the lobby, where he intends to use an array of diagonal columns to solve the challenge of aligning his structural supports with predetermined points in Foster’s foundation. “We get an almost Libeskind-esque language,” he says, “defined simply by connecting the dots.” He concludes with a courteous allusion to Libeskind’s legacy.
“Here you really see the original vision from the master plan,” he says, “realized in full.”
Libeskind renders his verdict with a slap on the table. “Congratulations, that is a super building,” he says. Then, with a touch of mischief, Libeskind turns to Janno Lieber. “I hope we’re going to see it going up, Mr. Janno.”
The initial reviews of Two World Trade Center’s design after its unveiling on June 9 were mainly positive, but as Libeskind says when we talk later, that was the easy part. “Between that first smile and the last stone is the challenge of architecture,” he says. To make the model real, Libeskind tells me, Ingels would have to find a way through “this complex space filled with what the city really is: economics, society, power brokers, politicians.”
Many elements of the tower’s design are still in flux. For a while, it lost one of its seven boxes, and then it got it back—but the height of the building shrank by 90 feet. And the tower has acquired one inconvenient critic: Douglas Durst, who happens to operate One World Trade Center next door. “I’m very disappointed in Bjarke’s design,” the developer tells me, explaining that he dislikes the orientation of its stepped gardens. “He turned his back on our building. Not even metaphorically. It’s very disrespectful.”
Durst also says he still thinks Ingels is a genius. A cynic might say the developer has an interest in minimizing competition as he attempts to lease his own World Trade Center building. (The anchor tenant is Condé Nast, the parent company of WIRED.) But Durst’s dissatisfaction illustrates a danger embedded in Ingels’ promiscuous success. Every client expects monogamous attention, and it’s not always possible to satisfy every dream.
It isn’t hard to see the question on the horizon. Can BIG keep getting bigger without losing its appealing spark? One competitor told me that architects around New York have been asking, “Is there anything he’s turning down?”
s big has expanded, Ingels has necessarily taken on the role of brand ambassador and delegated much authority to his 11 partners—including the company CEO, who used to work for McKinsey—and a talented staff of junior architects. But BIG is still a highly personalized operation. In mid-July, Ingels returns to the New York office from Europe to find all kinds of crises awaiting his intervention. There is an issue with the concrete he plans to use for the facade of a residential building. “Oh, that looks horrible,” he says, recoiling from a photo. There is an issue with a client, a tech executive building a house in the Palo Alto hills, who isn’t sold on Ingels’ preferred cross-shaped concept. “Just to do, like, another landscape-integrated house,” Ingels sighs, “maybe is not so fun.”
Then Ingels whirls off to a meeting in Brooklyn about a waterfront park pavilion. He tells me BIG’s design, which his staff calls the Dorito, has engineering issues. So he’s going to pitch a newly brainstormed concept: the Watchflower. He holds a plastic model of the pavilion that looks like a carnation on a stem. “It’s going to sail from Holland on a barge,” he says, “and then we’re going to plant it like this.” He jabs the stem downward.
The next morning, Ingels pays a visit to the BIG design team working on Two World Trade Center, which has recently moved into a studio at Silverstein’s headquarters, at the developer’s request. As Ingels begins to review a wall covered with diagrams and illustrations, Ute Rinnebach briefs him about the lobby, where his ingenious solution to the foundation problem—the “Libeskind-esque” sloping columns—has proven expensive. Ingels worries that the cheaper alternative, straight columns, would leave the lower floors cluttered with obstructions. But Rinnebach recommends straightening things out. “I could live with that,” Ingels concludes. “If we really want the truth, this is the truth. This is the truth in dollars.”