Search Engine x Better in Person

Search Engine has some exciting news about the moving image to announce, and we’re sharing an interview we loved with an unusual architect. Check out the video version on Freakonomics' YouTube page. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaOgiWHj3WQ

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Notion. I find Notion to be a really helpful tool for just being organized, having all of our team's institutional knowledge in one place, and making collaboration among our team members much easier. Notion is the AI workspace where your team's knowledge, projects, and agents all come together in one place. Teams using Notion move faster, cut friction and costs by consolidating tools, and stay aligned. Because everything lives in one connected system, the AI actually has the context to answer questions instantly and automate the busy work. It's trusted by 98% of the Forbes Cloud 100 and by over 100 million users. Learn more about how Notion can support your business at notion.com/searchengine.

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• 2:23Speaker 00

  Hello, Search Engine nation. I have some exciting, maybe controversial, probably not that controversial, news about our show. And then I'm going to play you an interview from a different show that I enjoyed for reasons which will become clear. So we'll have a board meeting soon for our incognito mode listeners in Q4. That's where we typically talk about the machinations, dreams, and internal numbers of Search Engine. But there's one piece of news I'm excited about and wanted to blab early for everybody else. Search Engine is about to start experimenting with video. This November, we're moving into a new studio of our own where we'll have not just microphones, but also cameras. The moving

• 3:05Speaker 00

  image was invented in 1888. We will begin experimenting with it in 2027. To be clear, we like making this audio show. It's working. We don't intend to stop. But we would like more people to find it. And most people's internet now is video, including often mine. Also, honestly, 2026 for me was the year when I found myself watching other people working in video, which just made me feel inspired. I had this feeling like, other people are having fun. I want to try. So next year, we're going to get caught trying. You will watch us throw some spaghetti at the wall. Some of it will be delicious. Some of it, we won't talk about afterwards. But for today, I want to share one of the videos

• 3:49Speaker 00

  I found inspiring. It's from a show called Better in Person, which is hosted by Stephen Dubner of Freakonomics. And it's just cool how he found a way to take the vibe and sensibility that works in his audio show and translate it to a visual show. He hosts the show from his actual house, which I just like seeing the inside of somebody's house who I've listened to for years. And so we're going to share our favorite episode so far. It's an interview Stephen did with the world-renowned architect Bjarke Ingels. This is the guy who built a power plant in Copenhagen with a ski slope on its roof. He's also helping NASA design buildings to go to the moon. Fascinating man. However, because Search Engine right now is an audio-only feed, we're going to share the audio, which works on its own. I've

• 4:32Speaker 00

  both listened to and watched this. But if you want to see the video, which is really cool, we're linking to the video. There's a link in our show notes. You can just click and see the inside of Stephen Dubner's house, where he keeps all his stuff. I'll let Stephen take it from here.

• 4:54Speaker 01

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

• 5:01Speaker 00

  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

• 5:42Speaker 00

  for the old Oakland A's who are moving to Las Vegas. 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 just moved in. So Bjarke brought a housewarming present.

• 6:03Speaker 02

  I have a gift for you.

• 6:04Speaker 00

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

• 6:47Speaker 03

  He's really busy.

• 6:47Speaker 00

  He said he's going to 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 going to show up.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  You'll hear from him. Yeah, I think so. He's pretty, he's very amiable.

• 6:59Speaker 00

  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.

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 7:11Speaker 00

  Anything, wide open.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Anything. Oh, my gosh.

• 7:15Speaker 00

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

• 7:16Speaker 03

  This feels very anonymous. Oh, man.

• 7:21Speaker 00

  And here is designer Casey Tucker.

• 7:23Speaker 04

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

• 7:35Speaker 00

  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?

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 8:00Speaker 00

  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. They're just...

• 8:09Speaker 02

  No, exactly. Yeah.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  Right? And I thought, oh, they're building more salt sheds. Like, I saw this amazing-looking shape. I had no idea 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, in the Danish and English?

• 8:36Speaker 02

  Exactly. 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.

• 8:47Speaker 00

  The firm is how big now?

• 8:48Speaker 02

  We are probably around 700 architects.

• 8:52Speaker 00

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

• 8:54Speaker 02

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

• 9:01Speaker 00

  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.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  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 I am not, I'm not the CEO. My role is really like the...

• 9:22Speaker 00

  Creative director?

• 9:24Speaker 02

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

• 9:37Speaker 00

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

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. So what kind of project do we want to do? 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...

• 10:03Speaker 02

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

• 10:06Speaker 05

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

• 10:10Speaker 02

  We do it 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 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 that 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 your idea and I'm gonna spend the next 10 years making that idea come true, and every time you show up in

• 10:51Speaker 02

  a meeting, you remind everybody, ah, this is my great idea, then it's not gonna be very fun, right?

• 10:57Speaker 05

  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.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  No, exactly. Like, one of my good friends is a 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 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.

• 11:45Speaker 05

  Okay, so you're pitching that as the downside, that he has to keep administering.

• 11:49Speaker 02

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

• 11:54Speaker 05

  Right.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  But the difference is, like, 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...

• 12:08Speaker 05

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

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Great, let's do it.

• 12:34Speaker 05

  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 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.

• 13:13Speaker 02

  That's true. There are some systemic issues that would be great to figure out. I think you're, I mean, even a 1% to 2% royalty to the estate would be...

• 13:24Speaker 05

  Who can we talk to about this?

• 13:25Speaker 02

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

• 13:45Speaker 05

  Love?

• 13:46Speaker 02

  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. So, we're gonna do it.

• 14:02Speaker 05

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

• 14:05Speaker 02

  It's simply how it is.

• 14:06Speaker 05

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

• 14:12Speaker 06

  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.

• 14:41Speaker 00

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• 18:04Speaker 05

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

• 18:39Speaker 02

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

• 19:23Speaker 05

  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.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, but of course, we are somehow competing like, you know. A Hamburg is only going to get one opera. And unless we really botch it, it's going to be a long time before they're going to need another one. Right? So therefore, we do have to compete fiercely to get those jobs. But again, we're not really competing against.

• 19:56Speaker 05

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

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. I mean, I've lost more competitions than most human beings alive. But essentially, like, and so the second thing is 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 you're dreaming of, right? 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.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  The sketch is something you do to get to where you end up doing the art piece.

• 20:48Speaker 05

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

• 20:55Speaker 02

  In that sense, it just, you have to jump through so many hoops. By architectural standards, 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 down. So like, I would have been a billionaire a long time ago if I was like a.

• 21:12Speaker 05

  Does that mean you're not a billionaire?

• 21:14Speaker 02

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

• 21:33Speaker 05

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

• 21:38Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 21:38Speaker 05

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

• 21:41Speaker 02

  I was dreaming of it, but I was no way 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 in rent.

• 21:58Speaker 05

  What's that translate to?

• 21:59Speaker 02

  That's like 800 bucks.

• 22:00Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 22:01Speaker 02

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

• 22:11Speaker 05

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

• 22:16Speaker 02

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

• 22:24Speaker 05

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

• 22:26Speaker 02

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

• 22:56Speaker 02

  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 the funny thing is, when you invited me to, to come and, and, and meet you, I was, I was actually very excited to meet you because like Freakonomics has actually been

• 23:40Speaker 02

  a book that I really enjoyed because it is saturated and because of your, your co-authors' 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 you thought like, why is an economist dealing with this? But it's because they were undocumented data 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 more real way.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 24:44Speaker 05

  I feel like you speak in oxymorons, actually.

• 24:47Speaker 02

  No, yeah, yeah.

• 24:47Speaker 05

  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.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  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 Complete Unknown.

• 25:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:09Speaker 02

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

• 25:16Speaker 05

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

• 25:21Speaker 02

  But I'm saying like, I love the movie and I started listening to his music.

• 25:25Speaker 05

  Oh, good.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  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 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

• 25:56Speaker 02

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

• 26:11Speaker 05

  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 happen to have a chalkboard in my apartment, so he sketched out his vision.

• 26:53Speaker 02

  We looked at it 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 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 develop some, some homes

• 27:37Speaker 02

  that could maybe offset the cost of doing it.

• 27:39Speaker 05

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

• 27:42Speaker 02

  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 got a new group to look into it and we were sort of invited to, to assist in that process.

• 28:01Speaker 05

  What's the cost of that versus this?

• 28:04Speaker 02

  No, yeah, so this was also infinitely cheaper.

• 28:06Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 28:07Speaker 02

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

• 28:11Speaker 05

  But there's got to be a bridge or a ramp somewhere down the way. That's going to be expensive or no?

• 28:16Speaker 02

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

• 28:32Speaker 00

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

• 28:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Right.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  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?

• 29:13Speaker 00

  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 Bjorka Ingol's thinking about the purpose of architecture? I mean, we can help you come up with one if you don't have one.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  No, no, 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.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  Do you believe that?

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, I was never good at it, but then at some point, 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 form giving, form giving. Because to design is to give form to that which has not yet been

• 30:29Speaker 02

  given form. In other words, to give form to the future. And like, in some way, like Søren Kierkegaard, I really believe that life is lived moving forward, but it's understood looking backwards, right?

• 30:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  Are you allowed to recycle losing ideas?

• 31:00Speaker 02

  We have the IP of, it is our IP.

• 31:04Speaker 00

  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?

• 31:14Speaker 02

  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.

• 31:28Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Just because we did it for someone else.

• 31:30Speaker 00

  Got it.

• 31:30Speaker 02

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

• 31:37Speaker 00

  You really don't. When I look at your buildings, I mean, some of them have similarities.

• 31:40Speaker 02

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

• 31:46Speaker 00

  Like what?

• 31:47Speaker 02

  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...

• 32:00Speaker 00

  Let's hear it a little bit.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, 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.

• 32:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  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. 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.

• 32:56Speaker 00

  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?

• 33:08Speaker 02

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

• 33:14Speaker 00

  [laughing]

• 33:17Speaker 02

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

• 33:24Speaker 00

  What did your father do for a living?

• 33:25Speaker 02

  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? And my father's name is Bungor Jensen. It's probably the two most common Danish names. So, but, and then he said, no, yeah, his name is Kjul Bungor. And so, ah, yeah. And then he turns around to his friend, and he says, this is Kjul Bungor's son. And then he says, who? He says, and then he says,

• 34:08Speaker 02

  the wise man from fiber. 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 them 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.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  [laughing]

• 34:30Speaker 02

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

• 34:34Speaker 00

  She applied you to architecture school, from what I recall.

• 34:39Speaker 02

  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 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.

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• 38:09Speaker 05

  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 ages, across many, many people. So, you're an architect, I would assume that you like that characterization,

• 38:52Speaker 05

  but I don't know, you tell me, what do you think?

• 38:55Speaker 02

  I mean, not that it's a pissing match, but I think one important distinction, one fundamental difference is that the other arts reflect, or comment, or represent reality, and great art will expand your perception of reality. A beautiful piece of music 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 you know, whatever art form, if it's a piece of literature or a poem, but architecture, of course, has the possibility to do that, but it doesn't relate to reality through representation or reflection,

• 39:40Speaker 02

  it relates to reality by producing it. So in that sense, architecture ends up becoming the world we live in, that we inhabit.

• 39:51Speaker 05

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

• 39:54Speaker 02

  I think it's a...

• 39:55Speaker 05

  Do you think of yourself as an artist?

• 39:57Speaker 02

  I definitely think of myself as an artist, but my canvas 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'd definitely done some great and exciting and significant things.

• 40:25Speaker 05

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

• 40:27Speaker 02

  But at that point, I thought like, I still haven't gotten an opera performance, and then I just realized, I'm not really getting there. We'd 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 library, or 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.

• 41:12Speaker 02

  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 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...

• 41:32Speaker 05

  You might need to start.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  Esoteric, exactly. 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 saying things honestly and out loud.

• 41:52Speaker 05

  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.

• 42:08Speaker 02

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

• 42:15Speaker 05

  But what was missing?

• 42:16Speaker 02

  My mom's a dentist, right? 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...

• 42:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 42:32Speaker 02

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

• 42:35Speaker 05

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

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Absolutely, I think that there's a lot of aesthetics. You don't want like a dentist that doesn't believe in aesthetics to mess with your smile. But in that sense, like, so, and that's in for an architect to be able to paint on that canvas, which is going to be the opera in Hamburg or the Philharmonic in Prague. That's the canvas, 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 man-made mountain range that is Manhattan.

• 43:11Speaker 05

  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, 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.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  I think the skyline 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 commerce and density, and that manifests itself in these kind of eruptions.

• 44:17Speaker 05

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

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:23Speaker 05

  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 the 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.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I think, I think New York is similar to, 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.

• 45:04Speaker 05

  And you feel that about Burning Man?

• 45:06Speaker 02

  No, I'm saying, I'm saying it's still great, so...

• 45:10Speaker 05

  What do you do there?

• 45:11Speaker 02

  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 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 that happens in both places because the absence of a single unifying identity

• 45:56Speaker 02

  creates this kind of canvas for a cacophony of offerings and properties. 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 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?

• 46:31Speaker 05

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

• 46:37Speaker 02

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

• 46:39Speaker 05

  Ah, yeah.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  100%.

• 46:43Speaker 05

  What do you love about it?

• 46:44Speaker 02

  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 man-made landscape of stairs that are fully accessible to the public, that you can actually circumnavigate the two pavilions that are the halls, there's a concert hall and an opera hall. 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...

• 47:21Speaker 05

  You're in favor of all that mashing up?

• 47:24Speaker 02

  But they're 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 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.

• 48:08Speaker 05

  Do you, um, 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 Biarca Ingles to mean?

• 48:20Speaker 02

  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. Cause 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 Johnson Wax.

• 48:47Speaker 05

  So you have another 10 years to warm up.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  Exactly. And, 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, uh, 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.

• 49:13Speaker 05

  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?

• 49:21Speaker 02

  Architecture is a little bit like Benjamin Button, right? That, uh, like, again, if you're like an athlete.

• 49:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  You, you should retire at 30, right?

• 49:32Speaker 05

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

• 49:38Speaker 02

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

• 49:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 49:42Speaker 02

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

• 49:47Speaker 05

  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.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  Cheers.

• 50:19Speaker 05

  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.

• 51:01Speaker 02

  It's funny, I read that Haagendash.

• 51:02Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's from the Bronx.

• 51:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 51:13Speaker 05

  Is that true?

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Nah.

• 51:24Speaker 05

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