Bjarke Ingels, one of the world's up-and-coming architects, has been tapped by Rupert Murdoch to be the head of design for the new building to be constructed at Two World Trade Center. The top half of the new construction will be home to some of Murdoch's media holdings, including 21st Century Fox Media and News. That's right, for better or for worse, Fox News' shiny new offices will now feature large and expansive lofty news rooms with windows overlooking World Trade Plaza.
Ingels' new design firm is called BIG (Bjarke Ingels Group), which was born out of Copenhagen and recently expanded to New York, where he now holds a staff of 170. Ingels couldn't have picked a more fitting name for his company, because this new endeavor will plop a massive 80-story asymmetrical skyscraper right in the heart of the bustling Financial District. The yet-to-be-approved designs depict a building that is seemingly teetering on the verge of collapse from certain vantage points, which has been both a strength and weakness in terms of its appeal as it has been shown around to those in charge of its funding and approval. While the effort seems excessive and risky to some who favor a more traditional form of square-foundation-based buildings, especially for something as important and iconic as a World Trade Center building, Ingels says he has been able to solve this problem by simply "redistributing the calories."
Ingels has already racked up a couple of big gigs in the city, including the massive project of building a new 10-mile long park surrounding lower Manhattan, meant to provide new support against the possibility of future damage from hurricanes. The park will cost the city a whopping $335 million, which is a small price to pay for what the project is meant to do for the city in the long run. After Hurricane Sandy, the city suffered from $19 billion in lost revenue and sustained property damage to various buildings and infrastructure, and Ingels' job will be to assure that this new park not only provides new open spaces and public facilities for the city's residents, but also assures something as catastrophic does not happen again.
Ingels has also been selected to design Google's new headquarters, comprised of many greenhouse-like domes surrounded by large lawns and winding bike paths. BIG's future, as Ingels describes it, is to "be both pragmatic and utopian." The plan is to bring solutions to corporations that defy the conventional standards of bland and brutalist architecture for something more inviting and groundbreaking, while still serving a specific company's needs. He has dismissed the notion that an architect must adhere to a single personal style, and this mindset has allowed him to whip up some of the most unique designs for some of the world's most recent ambitious construction efforts.
Ingels is a rising "starchitect" to keep an eye out for. Check out the rest of his interview and story over at Wired, and learn about some of his other projects that will be popping up in New York and across the globe.
