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.

“That’s a piece of info that hadn’t reached me—the building has to be safe from explosions.”

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.”

The 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.”