Stephen 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. 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 months. So just search for Freakonomics on YouTube and you will find Better in Person. 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.

Interviewer/Host

I know when you first went online and you're Danish, so the URL was Big Bjarke Ingelsgroup dk. Which if you read it, is Big Dick. That's on purpose, I assume.

Bjarke Ingels

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

Interviewer/Host

So that was not a self promotional URL?

Bjarke Ingels

No, no. Actually, like, I'm sure that it's gone into the spam filter in a few places.

Rachel Wilkins

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

Stephen Dubner

When I first started thinking about who

Interviewer/Host

to have on the show, I made a list.

Stephen Dubner

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, well, 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 plot in 2001. By the way, he told us that Bjarke means little bear in Danish. When he was 31, he founded Bjarke Ingels Group for 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. 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.

Bjarke Ingels

I gotta say, I have a gift for you.

Stephen Dubner

It was synthetic moondust 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 Ingles can be elusive, but I started out as 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.

Interviewer/Host

So we're talking to Bjarke next week. But Bjarke, he's not in New York very much.

Stephen Dubner

And he's busy.

Rachel Wilkins

He's really busy.

Interviewer/Host

He said he's going to call me sometime. So I actually took my phone off. Do not disturb for a whole day.

Stephen Dubner

He didn't call.

Interviewer/Host

So I have a feeling he's just going to show up.

Rachel Wilkins

Yeah, I think so. He's pretty heavy. He's very amiable.

Stephen Dubner

I met designer Noreen Chang in the hallway.

Interviewer/Host

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.

Bjarke Ingels

Oh, man.

Stephen Dubner

Anything.

Interviewer/Host

Wide open.

Rachel Wilkins

Anything.

Interviewer/Host

Oh, my gosh. You know what? It can be anonymous, too.

Stephen Dubner

This feels very anonymous.

Interviewer/Host

Oh, man.

Stephen Dubner

And here is designer Casey Tucker.

Interviewer/Host

I'm really curious about his evolving take

Bjarke Ingels

on the starting point for designing a building.

Stephen Dubner

I think he's a step ahead of us.

Interviewer/Host

Yeah,

Stephen 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, Moondust in Hand.

Interviewer/Host

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?

Bjarke Ingels

Exactly.

Interviewer/Host

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.

Bjarke Ingels

No, I said, yeah, exactly right.

Interviewer/Host

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, 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, Danish and English.

Bjarke Ingels

Exactly. Like. So my name in Danish would be Bjarge Ingels. And I normally say in English, it's like saying brk quickly, brk.

Interviewer/Host

The firm is how big?

Bjarke Ingels

Now we are probably around 700 architects.

Interviewer/Host

And you're in how many? Eight, ten cities.

Bjarke Ingels

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

Interviewer/Host

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.

Bjarke Ingels

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'm not the CEO. My role is really like the creative director. Creative direction, exactly. Got it. 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.

Interviewer/Host

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

Bjarke Ingels

Yeah, so what kind of projects do we. 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, I have to make sure that that's the idea that we pursue together.

Interviewer/Host

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

Bjarke Ingels

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 eureka moment can present itself. If everybody's 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 then we don't really want your idea to be the best one. Because I would want my idea to be the best one. But also if it's your idea, and I'm going to spend the next 10 years making that idea come true, and every time you show up in a meeting, you remind everybody, this is my great idea, then it's not going to be very fun.

Interviewer/Host

Right? 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.

Bjarke Ingels

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 where 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.

Interviewer/Host

Pitching that as the downside that he has to keep administering.

Bjarke Ingels

Yeah, no, no. But in that sense. So he just started making more companies.

Interviewer/Host

Right.

Bjarke Ingels

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

Interviewer/Host

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 but will go to the estate of the artist. Small, but like 1 or 3%. But, like, wouldn't you like that?

Bjarke Ingels

It would be great. Let's do it.

Interviewer/Host

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 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.

Bjarke Ingels

That's true. There are some systemic issues that would be great to. To figure out. I think you are. Even a 1 to 2% royalty to the estate would be. Who can we talk to about game changers? 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 love, 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 going to do it.

Interviewer/Host

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

Bjarke Ingels

It's simply how it is.

Stephen Dubner

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

Rachel Wilkins

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 going to take their wedding photos on my project one day, hopefully.

Interviewer/Host

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 the architects from the movies and there are characters, right. So I don't know, what does that feel like?

Bjarke Ingels

The challenge of an architect, 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. Of Hamburg. Hamburg is like the Venice of, Of. 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, 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.

Interviewer/Host

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.

Bjarke Ingels

Yeah, I mean, but of course we are somehow competing like, you know, a Hamburg is only gonna get one opera, 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 jobs. But again, we're not really competing against.

Interviewer/Host

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

Bjarke Ingels

I mean, I've lost more competitions than most human beings alive, but essentially. 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 sculpture. 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 sketch is something you do to get to where you end up doing the art pieces.

Interviewer/Host

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

Bjarke Ingels

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 dancer. Like, I would have been a billionaire a long time ago if I was like.

Interviewer/Host

Does that mean you're not a billionaire?

Bjarke Ingels

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

Interviewer/Host

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

Bjarke Ingels

Exactly.

Interviewer/Host

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

Bjarke Ingels

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 krona per month.

Interviewer/Host

What does that translate to?

Bjarke Ingels

That's like $800.

Interviewer/Host

Okay.

Bjarke Ingels

Because we had just come through a little financial collapse internally in the office. I had some hands with.

Interviewer/Host

Not a lot of work, a little financial collapse. Somebody told me that you're a fan of oxymorons.

Bjarke Ingels

No, Exactly. I think the oxymoron is maybe the secret sauce to everything, but we can get into that.

Interviewer/Host

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

Bjarke Ingels

No, I do think that an oxymoron is the opposite of polarization. Right. Because an oxyomoron 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, concept from literature of a place so perfect 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, blah, blah, but within that little constraint, you could actually make a pragmatic utopia. And the funny thing is, when you invited me to come and meet you, I was actually very excited to meet you because Freakonomics has actually been a book that I really enjoyed because it is saturated and because of 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 you thought, like, why is an economist dealing with this? But it's because they were undoctored 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 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 re. Be even more obvious, even more. Right. In a way, even though they feel

Interviewer/Host

wrong, I feel like you speak in oxymorons, actually. No, yeah, seriously, 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.

Bjarke Ingels

Exactly. They were probably meant to be joined but somehow landed in different boxes. I mean, one movie that I really enjoyed last year was complete unknown. And I was never that into Bob Dylan. I think he's more of an American phenomenon.

Interviewer/Host

Can I say there are a lot of Americans who aren't into Bob Dylan either.

Bjarke Ingels

I love him, but I say like I loved the movie and I started listening to his music.

Interviewer/Host

Oh good.

Bjarke Ingels

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

Stephen 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. Bjarkay 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.

Bjarke Ingels

We looked at it 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 if my son is 7 now, he could be like, he could have left home before he would ever know that there was a proven out, 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 that could maybe offset the cost of doing it.

Interviewer/Host

So is this actually happening or. It's still a plan.

Bjarke Ingels

We ended up presenting it at a Brooklyn Heights community meeting. And I think it's the only time where we did a community meeting where we got an applause. 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 assist in that process.

Interviewer/Host

What's the cost of that versus this?

Bjarke Ingels

No, I asked. Yeah, so this was also infinitely cheaper.

Interviewer/Host

Okay.

Bjarke Ingels

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

Interviewer/Host

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

Bjarke Ingels

Yeah. So there is the transition in either end that, of course. But 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.

Stephen Dubner

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

Bjarke Ingels

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.

Interviewer/Host

Right.

Bjarke Ingels

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.

Interviewer/Host

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

Bjarke Ingels

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

Interviewer/Host

Do you believe that?

Bjarke Ingels

Yeah, 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. If you over define things, there's no wiggle room for life within it. Right. 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 foam. Giving, 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. And in some way, like Sren 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.

Interviewer/Host

Are you allowed to recycle losing ideas?

Bjarke Ingels

No, we have the IP of it is our ip.

Interviewer/Host

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?

Bjarke Ingels

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 wants to get sued for, you know, we don't want to be unable to do our kind of work.

Interviewer/Host

Yeah.

Bjarke Ingels

Just because we did it for someone else. Got it. I mean, but of course, we also don't want to repeat the same building. And sometimes there's like.

Interviewer/Host

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

Bjarke Ingels

And also there are certain subjects that you haven't, you know, fully explored yet.

Interviewer/Host

Like what?

Bjarke Ingels

In music, the COVID 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. 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, let's say. 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.

Interviewer/Host

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?

Bjarke Ingels

Interesting. Okay. I would say first of all, I think my parents are like an oxymoron, actually. I would say objectively they're both very smart. We have a father who's incredibly sort of smart and wise.

Interviewer/Host

What did your father do for a living?

Bjarke Ingels

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 Bungo Jensen. It's probably the two most common Danish names. So, but. And then he said, no, his name is Kumbongo. And he said, oh yeah. And then he turns around to his friend and he says, this is Klubongo's son. And then he says, who? He says, Then he says, 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. 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. I never sort of inquired what he actually meant with dragon blood, but I kind of get it.

Interviewer/Host

She applied you to architecture school from

Bjarke Ingels

what I. 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 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.

Stephen Dubner

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Interviewer/Host

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.

Bjarke Ingels

What do 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 or. But architecture, of course, has the possibility to do all that, 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.

Interviewer/Host

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

Bjarke Ingels

I think it's a. It is a yes.

Interviewer/Host

Do you think of yourself as an artist?

Bjarke Ingels

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 at that point, I had the practice for 20 years, and we'd definitely done some grading. Exciting.

Interviewer/Host

And you're winning awards, the business is growing. Yes.

Bjarke Ingels

But at that point I thought, like, I still haven't gotten an opera For. And then I just realized I'm not really getting there. We've done some things. So then I ended up making a bucket list of. I think I put an opera house, a philharmonic, an airport, a stadium and a library, or like a kind of national library.

Interviewer/Host

Right.

Bjarke Ingels

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 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. The same is true for all of these. 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 the secret or in the power of manifestation as some kind of a. You might need to start esoteric. Yeah, 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.

Interviewer/Host

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 great.

Bjarke Ingels

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

Interviewer/Host

But what was missing.

Bjarke Ingels

My mom's a dentist, right. And I love 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. Yeah, let's call it. And I think my mom was a very good dentist.

Interviewer/Host

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

Bjarke Ingels

Absolutely. I think there's a lot of aesthet.

Interviewer/Host

Yeah.

Bjarke Ingels

You don't want like a dentist that doesn't believe in aesthetics to mess with your smile. But in that sense, like so in that sense 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 VA 57 imagine to contribute to the skyline of skylines, the kind of man made mountain range that Is Manhattan.

Interviewer/Host

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 supertalls 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.

Bjarke Ingels

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.

Interviewer/Host

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

Bjarke Ingels

Yeah.

Interviewer/Host

How do you feel about New York as a place to be now? 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.

Bjarke Ingels

Yeah, but 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.

Interviewer/Host

And you feel that about Burning Man?

Bjarke Ingels

No, no, I'm saying. I'm saying it's still great. So what do you do there? You know, I mean, I like to mostly just. 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 creates this kind of canvas for a cacophony of offerings and policies. 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. 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.

Interviewer/Host

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

Bjarke Ingels

I mean, I would have loved to have designed the Sydney Opera, 100%.

Interviewer/Host

What do you love about it?

Bjarke Ingels

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.

Interviewer/Host

But you're in favor of all that mashing up.

Bjarke Ingels

But they're not in any way a pastiche 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 Utzon 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 Eureka moment. It would be amazing if one day we would do something like that.

Interviewer/Host

Do you think about your legacy maybe long after 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?

Bjarke Ingels

The simplest answer is that I would love if 50 years from now I will be remembered 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 Johnson Wax.

Interviewer/Host

So you have another 10 years to warm up.

Bjarke Ingels

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

Interviewer/Host

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?

Bjarke Ingels

Architecture is a little bit like Benjamin Button. Right? Again, if you're like an athlete, you should retire at 30. Right.

Interviewer/Host

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

Stephen Dubner

Really?

Bjarke Ingels

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

Interviewer/Host

Yeah.

Bjarke Ingels

But it definitely has its merits later in life.

Interviewer/Host

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 gonna keep an eye on you for the next 10 years. So cheers to you, man.

Stephen Dubner

Cheers. Thanks for checking out this very first episode of Better in Person. But remember, this is a video show, so if you wanna 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 better in personreconomics.com or radio reconomics.com 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.

Bjarke Ingels

It's funny, I read that Haagen Dasch, 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.

Interviewer/Host

Is it true?

Stephen 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.