To encourage creative collaboration, the high-rise features open work floors, large stairwells that form cascading double-height communal areas, and amenities such as basketball courts, a running track, and screening rooms. “It’ll be pretty epic,” Ingels said.
Two’s planted terraces look down into the mossy churchyard of the venerable St. Paul’s Chapel (1766), once a refuge for 9/11 rescue and recovery workers. To preserve the views of the chapel from the memorial plaza, the building is aligned along the Wedge of Light plaza proposed by master planner Daniel Libeskind.
“Your capacity to communicate ideas is your hammer and chisel.”
BJARKE INGELS 2012
Increasingly, skyscraper amenities include the outdoor spaces that urban tenants prize. BIG’s stacked design creates 38,000 square feet (3,530.3 m2) of gardens, lush with greenery and spectacular views of the surrounding cityscape.
The tower rises in a series of in-and-out steps. On the north face, the cubes project out over the base, their undersides animated with news tickers. On the east side, they step in, a nod to the setbacks of classic 1920s office buildings, yielding six expansive garden terraces. The design creates the optical illusion that Two is leaning toward One World Trade Center, but the tower does not actually lean. “Even though they are not twins [and] they are not identical, they have a sibling relationship going on,” Ingels said.
Many of the tower’s adjoining floors are open, extending sight lines and allowing people to see colleagues five floors above or below. This configuration undoes “the vertical segregation that normally comes from working on multiple floors”—a solid design concept, but hardly a new one, having been utilized for decades by architects, most notably by Norman Foster. Yet Ingels’s precocious confidence is contagious, and his exploration of the overlap between the pragmatic and the utopian will introduce new audiences to the possibilities of architecture and design.
Within hours of the design’s publication, people compared the cubes to a “stairway to heaven,” which is how it appears when looking south. A simplistic assessment, but one that speaks to the reality that every building on the site shoulders the task of remembrance. The stairway, which looks capable of rising infinitely higher, recalls the many who took the stairs on 9/11—the firefighters who courageously climbed the Twin Towers and all those who, unable to descend, ascended into eternity. An office building, Two also functions as a memorial, just as One does. But while One bears the weight of the past, Two is free to look to the future. In a fitting final project that will complete the World Trade Center, Ingels’s skyscraper invites us to imagine what’s next.
Young, articulate, and telegenic, the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels is a self-styled epicenter of fun, having it and poking it. His mantra, “Yes is more,” also the title of his 2009 archicomic, a monograph cum manifesto written in comic-book form, synthesizes Mies van der Rohe’s modernist dictum, “Less is more,” Robert Venturi’s postmodernist take, “Less is a bore,” and Philip Johnson’s quip, “I am a whore.” He is a force field of charismatic cool and Icarian swagger. Even his mother calls him Mr. Big. His first completed project in the U.S. was a 2012 installation titled Times Square Valentine, which featured a ten-foot-high (3 m) pulsating red heart—an appropriate image, given the love that America has shown BIG’s designs in the years since. The architect briefly worked for Rem Koolhaas, whom he credits for teaching him that buildings must respond to a given circumstance, rather than fit into a predetermined style, before starting his own firm in 2001. He quickly amassed a body of admired work in Denmark, including 8 House, in Ørestad, the profile of which mimics a mountain. He moved to Manhattan in 2010 to oversee his design of VIA 57 West, a pyramidal apartment tower on West 57th Street, developed by the Durst Organization. Another New York City project, the Dryline, is a hybrid storm-barrier-and-park along New York City’s riverbanks, built to deter flooding. With English architect Thomas Heatherwick, he is designing Google’s new headquarters in Mountain View, California, a climate-proof expanse of sixty acres (24.3 ha) that sits under four glass canopies.