WeWork to Co-Work With Danish Architect Bjarke Ingels as Adviser

(Bloomberg) -- One of the buzziest couples in real estate is taking the relationship to the next level.

Adam Neumann's WeWork Cos. named Bjarke Ingels, founding partner of Bjarke Ingels Group A/S, chief architect of the co-working leader.

The Danish architect was already collaborating with WeWork -- which has opened 234 locations in almost two dozen countries since its founding in 2010 -- on its education venture and the conversion of Lord & Taylor's Manhattan flagship into WeWork's new headquarters. Now, in what his firm called an “advisory role,” he will help guide Neumann's effort to create spaces not just for working alongside other entrepreneurs (and your kids) but working out with them and living with them, too.

Ingels will “help us reimagine and reshape the future of our spaces,” Neumann said in a statement.

Ingels has become one of the world's highest-profile architects, designing the VIA 57 West apartment building on Manhattan's West Side; the Spiral skyscraper to be built at Hudson Yards, with a terrace on every floor; and 2 World Trade Center, which has been in limbo since Rupert Murdoch's companies decided not to become its anchor tenants.

Neumann has made a proper, though not yet profitable, business of co-working, once an afterthought in leasing commercial real estate. Ingels has contracts with companies like Alphabet Inc.'s Google to rethink the relationship between workers and work spaces.

--With assistance from Ellen Huet

To contact the reporter on this story: David M. Levitt in New York at dlevitt@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Daniel Taub at dtaub@bloomberg.net, Peter Jeffrey

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