How a Great Architect Thinks, with Bjarke Ingels | Better in Person

Is the oxymoron really “the secret sauce to everything”? That’s the case Ingels makes in this debut episode of our new video show Better in Person, filmed in Stephen Dubner’s living room. If you'd like to see the video version of Better in Person, watch it on YouTube or Apple Podcasts.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  This episode of Better in Person is presented by ChatGPT. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Download the new ChatGPT desktop app today.

• 0:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner. If you've been listening to Freakonomics Radio for a while, you know that we like to try new projects. For a while, we made a live game show. Over the years, we've made a bunch of other podcasts. Well, we just went and made another new show, but this one is different. It's a video show shot in my living room and it's called Better in Person. If Freakonomics is about how things work, Better in Person is about how people work. Everyone has a public story. I wanted the rest. We've just launched the first season of Better in Person on the Freakonomics YouTube channel. There will be 10 episodes over the next couple of months. So just search for Freakonomics on YouTube and you will find Better in Person.

• 0:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  But we're also happy to provide this podcast version of the show for you right here in the Freakonomics feed. The Freakonomics audience is smart, curious, and just the right amount of weird. And I know this because I read your emails. You've always been very generous in giving our new projects a chance, and I hope you'll give Better in Person a chance too, if only out of a burning need to see what I actually look like. And if you like the show, please spread the word. That is the single best thing you can do to support the stuff we make. As always, thanks for listening. Here now is Better in Person with the architect Bjarke Ingels.

• 1:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  I know when you first went online, and you're Danish, so the URL was big, bjarkkeingelsgroup.dk, which if you read it is big dick. That's on purpose, I assume?

• 1:52Speaker 01

  No, like, the thing is, like, it's hard. I've been struggling with this ever since, but...

• 1:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that was not a self-promotional URL?

• 2:00Speaker 01

  No, I know, exactly. Like, I'm sure that it's gone into the spam filter in a few places.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  This is Better in Person with Stephen Dubner and Bjarke Ingels.

• 2:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  When I first started thinking about who to have on the show, I made a list, many lists, actually. And one name always wound up near the top, Bjarke Ingels. If you already know something about Bjarke Ingels, you'll understand why I wanted him. And if you don't, you can thank me later. He is an architect in New York City and many other places. And there is a chance that he will go down as one of the greats. He started his first studio called Plopped in 2001. By the way, he told us that Bjarke means little bear in Danish. When he was 31, he founded Bjarke Ingels Group, or BIG. They have designed the spiral in New York City, the Lego house back in Denmark, and they're currently building a stadium for the old Oakland A's who are moving to Las Vegas.

• 3:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  He's also working with NASA and a 3D-printed company called Icon. They're trying to figure out how to do construction on the moon using mostly moon dust as the raw building material. I am making this new show in my living room, and we had just moved in. So Bjarke brought a housewarming present.

• 3:21Speaker 01

  I have a gift for you.

• 3:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  It was synthetic moon dust that they had created for that NASA project. He poured some out. It looked like fine gray beach sand, or maybe the remains of your favorite pet. This was my first time meeting Bjarke. I had tried to get a coffee with him before we taped, but we couldn't make it happen. Bjarke Ingels can be elusive. But I started out as a reporter. I'm used to just hanging around places. So I went to hang out at the big offices in downtown Brooklyn, and I talked to some of the architects there, including Rachel Wilkins, a senior landscape architect. So we're talking to Bjarke next week.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  But Bjarke, he's not in New York very much, and he's busy.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  He's really busy.

• 4:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  He said he's gonna call me sometime, so I actually took my phone off Do Not Disturb for a whole day. He didn't call, so I have a feeling he's just gonna show up.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  You think? Yeah, I think so. He's pretty, he's very amiable.

• 4:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  I met designer Noreen Chang in the hallway. Okay, so we're interviewing him next week. There must be some question that you would really like to ask him yourself that you've never gotten the opportunity.

• 4:28Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 4:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Anything wide open.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  Anything. Oh, my gosh.

• 4:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you know what? It can be anonymous, too.

• 4:35Speaker 04

  This feels very anonymous. Oh, man.

• 4:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  And here is designer Casey Tucker.

• 4:42Speaker 05

  I'm really curious about his evolving take on the starting point for designing a building. I think he's a step ahead of us.

• 4:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  I was starting to think that either Bjarke Ingels is kind of wonderful or maybe all his employees were just lying to me. A week after my visit to the big offices, Bjarke showed up at my apartment, moon dust in hand. Yeah, so I've been looking forward to this. I remember the first time I saw one of your buildings was your first, I think your first building in New York, Via 57. Is that what it's called?

• 5:17Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 5:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  I saw it going up. I saw a skeleton, and I first thought, you know, it's on the West Side Highway, and there are those, maybe, salt sheds that the highway department uses there.

• 5:27Speaker 01

  No, exactly, yeah.

• 5:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  And I thought, oh, they're building more salt sheds. Like, I saw this amazing-looking shape. I had no idea what it was. I'd never heard your name. And then as it started to flesh out, I thought it was just amazing and different and vibrant. And then I started to hear about you, and it seems that you're kind of amazing and different and vibrant as well. So I really appreciate your being here. Can you just say your name in the Danish?

• 5:52Speaker 01

  The Danish.

• 5:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Danish and English.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  Exactly, like, so my name in Danish would be Bjarke Ingels. And I normally say in English, it's like saying B-R-K quickly, B-R-K.

• 6:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  The firm is how big now?

• 6:07Speaker 01

  We are probably around 700 architects.

• 6:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you're in how many, eight, 10 cities?

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, we are like in seven cities. Copenhagen, New York, London, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Zurich, and Shanghai.

• 6:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  I mean, you're pretty big. You're building a lot of big projects, but I'm just curious about the balance between the commerce and the creativity or the art, or whatever you call it.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  I'm not a big one for titles. Also, I think you don't really need a title when you already named the company after yourself. But, but I am not, I'm not the CEO. My role is, is really like the...

• 6:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Creative director?

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Creative director, exactly. Like, and in that sense, I do have an important

• 6:49Speaker 01

  take on a lot of things, but my focus is really what we're doing, what we should be doing, and how we're doing it, like...

• 6:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you're steering the ship in terms of what kind of projects do we want to do, though, in addition to design?

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, so what kind of project do we want to do? Like, and how to win that work? Once in a while, I have a great idea, and I love it when that happens. But it's not my job description. My job description is to make sure that whenever the brilliant idea presents itself, no matter who comes up with it,

• 7:21Speaker 01

  I have to make sure that that's the idea that we pursue together.

• 7:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  How do you make sure that the person who had the idea gets proper credit?

• 7:28Speaker 01

  We do it by, by never attributing, everybody has full credit for the whole project, no matter what they did in it, where you create an almost primordial soup by doing a ton of iterations and, and putting everything out there so that the hürica moment can present itself. If everybody is somehow sitting there and holding a little bit back because they want to make sure that they get full credit for whatever idea they come with, that also means, like, then we don't really want your idea to be the best one. Because I wouldn't want my idea to be the best one. But also, if it's, if it's, if it's your idea, and I'm gonna spend the next 10 years making that idea come true, and every time you show up in a meeting, you remind everybody, ah, this is my great idea,

• 8:13Speaker 01

  then it's, it's not gonna be very fun, right?

• 8:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  So as an architect, you are commissioned to, or win a competition to, or somehow enter into an agreement to design a building. Then let's say the building gets built, and it's successful. It opens up. Somebody owns it, you don't own it. But you made it. As far as I know, there's no such thing as an architecture royalty. I've never heard of it. Maybe there is.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  No, I, no, yeah, exactly. Like, one of my good friends, he's a kind of serial entrepreneur, and we found that there were so many similarities between the work we do. And also why, like, after having done this for 25 years, I still love it and it still feels fresh. And that is simply because I never entered the stage of administration, whereas like, he would, he would make a new company, and then after five to six years, it would reach a place where it could now sort of live on its own, right?

• 9:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you're pitching that as the downside, that he has to keep administering?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, but in that sense, like, so, so he just started making more companies.

• 9:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  But, but the difference is, like, when, when he reaches five or six years and it starts running, it pays him dividend, right? Whereas I just hand over the keys to the new owner, and then I start looking for a new job. So...

• 9:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can I say, it makes no sense to me. I know that systems evolve the way they do, kind of randomly, but that one doesn't make much sense to me, that the architect has literally no royalties. And some might say, as with artists now, right? In Europe, there's like a small percentage of a sale will go to the estate of the artist.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  I see, yeah.

• 9:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  But like, 1% or 3%. But like, wouldn't you like that?

• 9:49Speaker 01

  Great, let's do it.

• 9:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Here's the other thing about your field that makes no sense to me. The amount of training and the amount of intellect that goes into being an architect is large. The average salary in the industry is really low, considering, if you look at years of education versus salary, it's hard to find something worse than architecture. I assume you do fine because you're the, the boss, but how do you, how do you think about that? And also, how do you persuade people to stay in it? Because we spoke with your people, and they're loyal, but they're working very hard at something that they had to train for, for many years, and it takes a lot of talents that many people don't have, and then they're not rewarded very well.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  No, that's true. There are some, some systemic issues that would be great to, to figure out. I think, I think you're, I mean, even, even a 1% to 2% royalty to the estate would be...

• 10:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Who can we talk to about this?

• 10:43Speaker 01

  You know, like, you know, like, I mean, I would love to make the industry more profitable. The problem is, architecture is an art form or profession where you have the combination of artistic integrity and technical liability. We do it almost mostly for...

• 11:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Love?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  For, yeah, for, for, for our own benefit, or like, let's say, for the love of that, like, even though the clients may not appreciate it, it's still true.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  So we're gonna do it.

• 11:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Does it hurt your heart a little bit when the clients don't appreciate it?

• 11:23Speaker 01

  It's simply how it is.

• 11:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  I had asked some architects at BIG about this very thing. Here's Rachel Wilkins again.

• 11:30Speaker 03

  When you work at this level, you have to really be hungry for it. And you have to have an appetite for doing hard things and understand that that's how you get to do the cool stuff and that's how you get better at what you do. Yeah, I work long hours, but I'm building a piece of New York. And that like, you know, people are gonna take their wedding photos on my project one day, hopefully.

• 11:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what's it feel like to actually design and create and then build and then stand in a building? It's hard for me to really envision what that feels like other than a power trip. I think if I, if I had the ability to do what you do, which I don't on many dimensions, I think there would be a feeling like, yes, I, I made that. And there would be an air of, I think, kind of cockiness or superiority. I don't know, maybe that is you. And you know, we know, we know the architects from the movies and there are characters like that.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 12:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I don't know, what does that feel like?

• 12:30Speaker 01

  The challenge of an architect, you have to, you have to compete in competitions and you have to win the competition.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  We just won this, the New Opera in Hamburg. That's really a dream job. It's on an island in the middle of the Hafen city, like the port city of Hamburg. Hamburg is like the Venice of Northern Germany. And of course, we have to compete with some of our friends and colleagues, some of the best architects in the world. But it's not a competition where you have to defeat your opponent. It's not a boxing match. So in that sense, you're not really competing with them, although they are your competitors. You are somehow trying to make the absolute best project that you can.

• 13:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is this really true? I've heard people say that architecture is not as cutthroat as one might think. Rivalry between firms. I tended to not believe that to be true, but you're saying it may be.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, but of course, we are somehow

• 13:28Speaker 01

  competing, like, you know, Hamburg is only gonna get one opera. And, and unless we really botch it, it's gonna be a long time before they're gonna need another one, right? So therefore, we do have to compete fiercely to get those, those jobs. But again, we're not really competing against.

• 13:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  I think the person who wins the job says it like that.

• 13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. I mean, I've, I've lost more competitions than most human beings alive. But, but, but essentially like, and so, so the second thing is

• 14:00Speaker 01

  to this idea, what does it feel like? The problem of architecture is that our canvas is so large and so expensive. Like it even makes film seem affordable compared to buildings. Because if you're a painter, unless you're really struggling, you can actually paint the painting that, that you're dreaming of, right? And, and the same with a sculptor, it may be a little bit more production value depending on your material. But an architect, I mean, of course, we can do all kinds of sketches, but that's not really the art. The, the sketch is something you do to get to where you end up doing the art piece.

• 14:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are you saying you're perpetually, you personally are perpetually disappointed by not getting to build what you initially want?

• 14:46Speaker 01

  In that sense, it just, you have to jump through so many hoops. By architectural standards, I'm, I'm relatively young, I just turned 50. But you know, that would be like age of retirement. I would have retired 10 years ago if I was ballet dancer. So like, I would have been a billionaire a long time ago if I was like a.

• 15:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  Does that mean you're not a billionaire?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So, so, so in that sense,

• 15:11Speaker 01

  it, it has sort of taken me a quarter of a century to assemble a team and, and sort of gain the experience and the notoriety to become eligible to, to be able to even compete.

• 15:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  To be able to compete in that level of like the Hamburg Opera House, you're saying?

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 15:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  You weren't, you weren't trying to get that kind of job 10 years ago?

• 15:32Speaker 01

  I was dreaming of it, but I was nowhere near it. I was actually thinking, right when I started BIG, Copenhagen got its first woman mayor. And she had an idea to do 5,000 homes within the next five years for a maximum of 5,000 kroner per month.

• 15:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's that translate to?

• 15:50Speaker 01

  That's like 800 bucks.

• 15:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay.

• 15:52Speaker 01

  Because we had just come, come through a little financial collapse internally in the office. I had some, some hands with not a lot of work to do.

• 16:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  A little financial collapse. Somebody, somebody told me that you're a fan of oxymorons?

• 16:06Speaker 01

  No, exactly, exactly. Like I think the oxymoron is maybe the secret sauce to, to everything. But we can get into that.

• 16:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can we get into that now? What do you mean by that?

• 16:16Speaker 01

  No, I, I do think that an oxymoron is the opposite of polarization, right? Because an oxymoron is a concept that, that has as its constituent parts seemingly mutually exclusive or diametrically opposite contradictory elements, right? A typical oxymoron would be utopian pragmatism.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Because, let's say utopia is this like concept from, from literature of a place so perfect that it can't exist in reality. And pragmatism is dealing with the world as it is. And when you combine those two mindsets, when you have to design a space, you have the opportunity to make this little corner of the world into your ideal world, your dream world. And of course, it needs to plug into all of the practicalities of society and blah. But within that little constraint, you could actually make a pragmatic utopia. And, and the funny thing is when you invited me to, to come and, and, and, and meet you,

• 17:24Speaker 01

  I was, I was actually very excited to meet you because like Freakonomics has actually been a, a book that I really enjoyed because it, it is saturated and because of your, your, your co-author's ability to sort of collect all of these incredible data sets, getting them from drug dealers and prostitutes and dating games and all kinds of random stuff where, where you thought like, why is an economist dealing with this? But it's because they were undocumented data

• 17:58Speaker 01

  about things where we have a lot of assumptions out of preconception or prejudice. And I think when you can go beyond that, you start sort of understanding the world in a, in a, in a more real way. And I would actually say like, in our work, simply by not boxing things into pre-established identities, you can create a space of opportunity where you might see new potential relationships that may seem contradictory or surprising, but can actually be even more obvious, even more right in a way, even though they feel wrong.

• 18:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  I feel like you speak in oxymorons, actually.

• 18:37Speaker 01

  No, yeah, yeah.

• 18:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Seriously, I mean, like you want to join, you want to be the person or a person who joins together things that weren't meant to be joined, that brings together some impossible combination.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Exactly, they were probably meant to be joined, but somehow landed in, in different boxes. I mean, one movie that I really enjoyed last year was

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Complete Unknown.

• 18:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  And I was never that into Bob Dylan. I don't think he's more of an American phenomenon, but, but, but.

• 19:08Stephen J. Dubner?

  Can I say there are a lot of Americans who aren't into Bob Dylan either? I love him, but.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  But, but I, I would say like, I, I love the movie and I started listening to, to his music.

• 19:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, good.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  But, but, and I think a lot of people who love Bob Dylan didn't like the movie or whatever. But however, for someone who, who didn't know anything, what I loved about it, which I could so, so much recognize is that the people who embraced him, to begin with, they embraced the aspect of him that was akin to them. And anything that he allowed himself that transcended their very limited definition of, of their identity or the right identity

• 19:47Speaker 01

  was so provocative to them that, like, like this idea that you, you really wanna label things? And now it's like, it's here because you can either be here or there. And if you're not, if, if all of you doesn't fit here, then you're against us.

• 20:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you want to live in a different world than the one that exists, you can always try to change it yourself. Bjarke is a father of two. His seven-year-old son Darwin lives here in New York. When Bjarke was buying a home in Brooklyn Heights, a historic neighborhood with an elevated promenade, he heard about plans to renovate the BQE, the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. The BQE is a famously bad stretch of urban highway that runs beneath the promenade. The city's renovation plan called for a temporary highway built at promenade level. Bjarke thought he had a better idea and he pitched it to his new neighbors. I happened to have a chalkboard in my apartment, so he sketched out his vision.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  We looked at it and, and the, and the plan that I found out was that they were planning to do a six-lane highway on temporary stilts. I just saw that, you know, if my son is seven now, he could be like, he could have left home before he would ever know that there was a promenade, right? So then we thought, what you could do, maybe cut a little bit into the, the backside of these berms. You can do the six lanes, you put a lid on it and, you know, you can repair it and make it a promenade. You have the same capacity of traffic, you create 10 hectares of new parkland. And there's even a few plots where you could

• 21:25Speaker 01

  develop some, some homes that could maybe offset the cost of doing it.

• 21:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  So is this actually happening or it's still a plan?

• 21:32Speaker 01

  We ended up presenting it at a Brooklyn Heights community meeting. And I think it's the only, only time where we did a community meeting where we got an applause. But, but everybody could see that this was probably better. Eventually, they stopped doing what they were doing. They, they got a new group to look into it and we were sort of invited to, to assist in, in that process.

• 21:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's the cost of that versus this?

• 21:54Speaker 01

  No, no, yes, yes. So this was also infinitely cheaper.

• 21:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Because you basically establish the highway on the ground. You put a little lid on it.

• 22:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  But there's gotta be a bridge or a ramp somewhere down the way. That's gonna be expensive or no?

• 22:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there is the transition in, in either end that of course was, but.

• 22:13Speaker 01

  But like, I like to say that some Swedish friends of mine, they gave me a T-shirt that says, "If you think good architecture is expensive, then try bad architecture."

• 22:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Big has by now published several books. Bjarke brought up the first one when we sat back down.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Our first book in the form of a graphic novel about architecture is called Yes is More. And Yes is More is this idea of not defining yourself by who or what you are against, not delineating this is right and all of that is wrong. But I like to say that the traditional idea of the revolutionary or the rebel is someone who is defined by who or what they are against.

• 22:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  But if your definition is who or what you are against, then you are by definition a follower in reverse. Because the others set the agenda, you just say the opposite, right?

• 23:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  I love Yes is More. I think it's a great title. But is there a name for your philosophy about, like what you're describing right now? It sounds a little bit like what you were saying earlier. It's pragmatic utopianism or utopian pragmatism. But do you have a kind of school of Bjarke Ingol's thinking about the purpose of architecture? I mean, we can help you come up with one if you don't have it.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  No, I know, exactly. But I think I have a feeling that by now, maybe, I would say like at some point, like any kind of good board member would always say that you have to make a kind of a mission statement and a vision statement, blah, blah.

• 23:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you believe that?

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I was never good at it, but then at some point,

• 23:44Speaker 01

  because we had grown a little bit, I thought, okay, so let's try to say, and I always had this idea that if you write things down, they almost die immediately. Like if you overdefine things, there's no wiggle room for life within it, right? So, but then I thought like, okay, what is the least reductive or constraining statement that could be said that should be true for us? And then I tapped into this idea that the Danish word for design is formgiving, form giving, because to design is to give form to that which has not yet been given form. In other words, to give form to the future.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  And like in some way, like Sir and Kierkegaard, I really believe that life is lived moving forward, but it's understood looking backwards, right? In a project, let's say just like the Hamburg Opera that we just won, I would say elements of it, some of the ideas that inhabited, were even born for a lost competition, for an art museum.

• 24:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Are you allowed to recycle losing ideas?

• 24:50Speaker 01

  We have the IP of, it is our IP.

• 24:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  When you enter a competition, do they pay you, for instance, to attempt to win the competition? And if so, does that win them any rights at all to the design?

• 25:05Speaker 01

  I mean, of course, like some clients want to make sure that they own the IP of the work we do for them. No one, no one wants to get sued for, you know, we don't want to be unable to do our kind of work.

• 25:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Just because we did it for someone else.

• 25:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Got it.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  I mean, but of course, we also don't want to repeat the same building. And sometimes there's like discussions.

• 25:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  When I look at your buildings, I mean, some of them have similarities.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  There's some idiosyncrasies and also there's certain subjects that you haven't, you know, fully explored yet.

• 25:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Like what?

• 25:38Speaker 01

  In music, the cover song. One that just comes to mind is like a Swedish band called The Knife, one of my favorites. They have a song called Heartbeats. It's a very like, and the lead singer, she has this very.

• 25:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  I can hear a little bit.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not, I'm not gonna do it for you. But she has a very jarring vocal and the instrument sensation is like very sort of screaming electronic, right? Then Jose Gonzalez, another Swedish musician, did this beautiful guitar version of it. It's clearly the same song, like the same tune. Like, let's say the, the architecture of the way the notes drop on the paper is the same, but the materialization, the manifestation is completely different. And then this other Swedish band, Amazon, did a third version of it. And they're all great songs and the world would be a lesser place if they didn't all three exist.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  And imagine if just, just because they did this first one in this specific way, no other version could live, that would be like a huge loss.

• 26:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  The way you talk about this stuff is very rare and inspiring to me. And I think will be inspiring to a lot of people. And so the next natural question for most people is, well, how do I get some of that? Whether it's for me or my children.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Interesting. Okay, so I would say, I mean, first of all, I think my parents are like an oxymoron, actually.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  I would say objectively, they're both very smart. We have a father who's incredibly sort of smart and wise.

• 27:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  What did your father do for a living?

• 27:16Speaker 01

  He's a, he's an engineer. He graduated from Danish Technical University. He reversed engineered how to make fiber optics and started the production of fiber optics. It was kind of funny. The moment that I remember that I was the most proud of my dad was right after he retired. I was at a party in Copenhagen and these sort of youngish men came over and said, what's the name of your father? My father's name is Bongor Jensen. It's probably the two most common Danish names, so. But, and then he said, no, yeah, his name is Kjul Bongor. And so, ah, yeah, and then he turns around to his friend and he says, this is Kjul Bongor's son. And then he says, who? He says, and then he says, the wise man from fiber.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  And I was like, and I was like, sort of, imagine that the young lions in the company, they refer to him as the wise man from fiber. So I called him up on the spot and said, like, you know, your legacy is secured, you know? And then he said, you have a mother with dragon blood.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  And I never sort of inquired what he actually meant with dragon blood, but I kind of get it.

• 28:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  She applied you to architecture school, from what I.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was a collaborative effort between my parents. But it was, but it was because I had probably intended to take a year off and enjoy my early youth, but, but I didn't have like a very specific plan. Then when I came back from summer holidays, I was actually kind of into the idea. And then I had been accepted at architecture school, so it worked out well.

• 28:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  This episode of Better in Person is presented by ChatGPT. ChatGPT work moves beyond answers into getting real work done. It's a new experience in ChatGPT for bigger multi-step projects across web, mobile and desktop. You can give ChatGPT work a goal and have it gather context, choose an approach, create the output and continue iterating, all while you stay in control. It can help turn messy inputs into useful outputs like briefs, spreadsheets, dashboards, presentations, prototypes, landing pages and workflows. You can even ask ChatGPT work to take on entire workflows with a single request. Here's an example. It can turn customer research into a campaign brief,

• 29:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  use that brief to create marketing assets and adapt those assets for different markets, carrying context through every step. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Download the new ChatGPT desktop app today.

• 29:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Someone mentioned to me just in a conversation, it was my wife, who you rode up in the elevator with. And she knows art much better than I do, visual art. And she thinks architecture is actually the highest form of art. Reasoning being, you know, you can go see the most amazing piece of visual art. Maybe a million people will see it in a year, whatever. But you take it in and it may affect you and a million people, but it's kind of still individual. Whereas a piece of architecture, a building, a plaza, a living room, whatever, it changes behavior in a way that is often, you know, huge across, across ages, across many, many people. So you're an architect. I would assume that you like that characterization, but I don't know. You tell me, what do you think?

• 30:44Speaker 01

  I mean, not that it's a pissing match, but I think one, one important distinction, one fundamental difference is that the other arts reflect or comment or represent reality. And, and great art will expand your perception of reality. Can a beautiful piece of music can, can make you sort of listen to noises or sounds that you might have disregarded as irrelevant or disharmonious. And you can suddenly see the potential beauty in them. And, and you know, whatever art form, if it's a piece of literature or poem or. But architecture, of course, has the possibility to do that.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  But, but it doesn't relate to reality through representation or reflection. It relates to reality by producing it. So in that sense, architecture ends up becoming the world we live in, that we inhabit.

• 31:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  So is that a yes then? Does it, is it a form of art?

• 31:43Speaker 01

  I think it's a.

• 31:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you think of yourself as an artist?

• 31:47Speaker 01

  I definitely think of myself as an artist, but my canvas is is reality. In 2020, I made a kind of confessional because it's sometimes you can also shield yourself against disappointment and failure by not truly confessing your dreams, right? So, and at that point, I had to practice for 20 years. And we've definitely done some great and exciting and significant things.

• 32:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're winning awards, the business is growing, yes?

• 32:17Speaker 01

  But at that point, I thought like I'm I still haven't gotten an opera first like. And then then I just realized I'm not really getting there. We've done some things, but so then I ended up making a bucket list of a I think I put an opera house, a Philharmonic, an airport, a stadium and a and a library, like a kind of national library, right? And then I gave speeches in the studio about why this was important and I got everybody to agree that we would be willing to to over invest up to 25% of our earnings to win these kinds of opportunities when they presented themselves. Because there's also in architecture, there is this catch 22 that no one will ever entrust you with an airport until you've already done an airport.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  The same is true for all of these. So, but simply by making that confession to myself and to everybody around me, within less than two years, we'd already won the Philharmonic in Prague and and the airport in Zurich. So it felt, I mean, and I don't believe in in the secret or in the power of manifestation as some kind of a

• 33:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  You might need to start.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Esoteric, exactly. But but I think where it is true that by being brutally honest to yourself and the world, everybody can understand a little bit clearer what it is. So in that sense, there is a certain manifestation in in in saying things honestly and out loud.

• 33:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  It sounds to me like what you're saying is that you knew you were succeeding. You know you're good. You're building up a portfolio that's global and interesting and catches people's attention. But it sounds to me like you're saying you want to be one of the greats.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  I mean, I, but again, I don't know that that is the drive. I think it is really the

• 34:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  But what was missing?

• 34:06Speaker 01

  My mom's a dentist, right? And and I love her this quote, she said like, you can't really say it as a dentist, but dentists love drilling in teeth. You know, like, so like, so if you have a craft.

• 34:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Let's call it, and I think my mom was a very good dentist.

• 34:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  I mean, there's an artistry to it, to be fair.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I think that there's a lot of aesthetics.

• 34:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  You don't want like a dentist that doesn't believe in aesthetics to to mess with your smile. But in that sense, like, so in that sense, for an architect to to be able to paint on that canvas, which is going to be the opera in Hamburg or the Philharmonic in Prague.

• 34:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  That's the kind of, and you know, the first, like, I remember when we got the job to do VF57, imagine to contribute to the skyline of skylines, the kind of manmade mountain range that is Manhattan.

• 35:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you like, so Midtown in the last maybe 15 to 20 years has really changed. Anybody who hasn't been to New York, they come and they see there are probably, I don't know, 12 or 15 super talls between Central Park South and Park Avenue and so on. Most people I know who consider themselves tasteful people who like good classy and classic architecture, they just write it all off. When I look out the window and see it, I see vibrancy in life. I don't really care that like the building. I also know that all these buildings in history go up and everyone hates them at first, then 50 years later, they love. The Eiffel Tower, everybody hated.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  I think the skyline of of New York is this collective artwork. That's not about the greatness of the individual buildings. It's really about almost like the raw energy of of of commerce and and density and that manifests itself in these kind of eruptions.

• 36:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you like, I know you live here and in Copenhagen, but you're traveling all the time, I gather, right?

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  How do you feel about New York as a place to be now? I feel like I feel like New York kind of fell off the I mean, it sounds ridiculous to say fell off the global radar in a way in that mostly when people from outside of New York talk about it last 20 or 30 years, it's about what a difficult place it is, a dangerous place, a dirty, expensive place. But we who live here think it's, you know, marvelous. Difficult, but marvelous. I'm just curious what you think about it.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think I think New York is similar to it's maybe it's similar to maybe Burning Man or something like in the sense that everybody always has this kind of strong idea that New York was much better 10 or 20 years ago. And now it's not the same.

• 36:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you feel that about Burning Man?

• 36:55Speaker 01

  No, no, I'm saying, I'm saying it's it's it's still great. So

• 37:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  What do you do there?

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Exactly, you know, I mean, I like to mostly just in I would say both places are similar in the sense that there is no host at Burning Man and there is also no single identity in New York. But everybody brings their A game. It's almost like this idea that everybody enjoys to the extent of their desires and they contribute to the extent of their abilities, right? Same is true in both places. So you have like the the kind of the kind of crazy and you also have like this kind of you know, like a back door down a stair and then there's something incredible in a different way. And and that happens in in both places because the absence of a single unifying identity

• 37:46Speaker 01

  creates this kind of canvas for a cacophony of of offerings and and processes. And therefore, it's also because they have such notoriety and a lot of people have had great pivotal moments in both places at a certain time in their life. But the truth is you cannot enter Narnia the same way twice, like so the wardrobe is is one way in there and then you have to find another way into Narnia. So therefore, of course, when you return, you're not going to find what you found when you were 22, right?

• 38:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's a building that you wish you had designed?

• 38:26Speaker 01

  I mean, I would have loved to have designed the Sydney Opera.

• 38:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ah, yeah.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  100%.

• 38:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  What do you love about it?

• 38:33Speaker 01

  It's it's a it's an opera house, right? So it is a somewhat elitist institution, but it's made in such a way that it creates this manmade landscape of stairs that are fully accessible to the public, that you can actually circumnavigate the two pavilions that are the the halls. There's a concert hall and an overhaul. And then on top of this incredible, incredibly generous public invitation, you have these pavilions that are like light and resting. And they are evocative of Chinese pagodas, of Gothic vaults, of Mayan temples, but

• 39:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're in favor of all that mashing up?

• 39:13Speaker 01

  But but but they're but they are not in any way a prestige of either of them. They're just because they somehow they transcend any kind of cultural identity or bias. And then and then also it has this underlying rigor that it's not just some kind of empty gesture. Because Utsun had this insistence on what he called the additive, that any kind of expression should be able to be made with industrialized repetitive elements. So it was not until he found out that you could actually cut the shells out of the surface of a sphere. Legend has it, he was peeling an orange and then he had the freak moment. It would be amazing if one day, you know, we would do something like that.

• 39:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you do you think about your legacy, maybe long after you're you're gone? Do you think about what your name 50 years from now, let's say? What would you like Bjarke Ingels to mean?

• 40:10Speaker 01

  The simplest answer is that I would love if 50 years from now, I will be remembered for for work I haven't done yet. Because like Frank Lloyd Wright, actually, the two great Franks of American architecture, you have Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry. Frank Lloyd Wright had turned 60 when he started work on Falling Water, Guggenheim and and Johnson Wax.

• 40:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you have another 10 years to warm up.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  Exactly. And and the same is actually true for, I mean, of course, both of them. Frank Gehry, he had turned 60 before he started the the Guggenheim in Bilbao and Disney Concert Hall and and all of that. He may have done the fish in Barcelona like a few things, but but he definitely had like a very successful career by any standards. But what he will be remembered for hadn't been started.

• 41:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  So that implies to me at least that architecture is one of these lifelong art forms that you really can get better as you go older. Is that the idea?

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Architecture is a little bit like Benjamin Button, right? That like, again, if you're like an athlete, you should retire at 30, right?

• 41:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  And also, there's a feeling when you're an athlete that every day past 25, you're declining. Whereas you have the opposite, really.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  No, exactly. But it's frustrating when you're 25 in architecture.

• 41:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  But but it definitely has its has its merits later in life.

• 41:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, I knew of you from reading about you and I suspected that you would be interesting to talk to and fun and would illuminate a lot of things. But like I maybe envisioned it on a scale of eight and like you were a 12. So I'm so happy for you that you've accomplished what you've accomplished. But even better, I know that you really haven't even started yet. So I'm going to keep an eye on you for the next 10 years. So cheers to you, man.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  Cheers.

• 42:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thanks for checking out this very first episode of Better in Person. But remember, this is a video show, so if you want to see it in all its high def glory, just go to the Freakonomics YouTube channel. We will be publishing 10 episodes there of this first season of Better in Person. Let me know what you think. Our email is [email protected] or [email protected]. You can see the full credits at the end of every video episode on YouTube. We will be back soon right here with more Freakonomics Radio and more Better in Person audio. Until then, take care of yourself and if you can, someone else too.

• 42:50Speaker 01

  It's funny, I read that Haagendash,

• 42:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, it's from the Bronx.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  The founders tried to come up with a name that sounds Danish and there's nothing Danish sounding about it. And it also includes letters that don't exist in the Danish alphabet.

• 43:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is that true?

• 43:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Thanks again to ChatGPT for sponsoring today's episode of Better in Person. ChatGPT can help teams move from goals to real outcomes. Put ChatGPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Download the new ChatGPT desktop app today.