Search Engine - Search Engine x Better in Person

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

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.

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 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 who 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 I found inspiring is from a show called Better in Person, which is host. by Stephen Debner 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, B.R.K. Engels. 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 both listened to and watch 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. This is Better in Person with Stephen Dubner and Bjorka Ingalls.

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, Bjarké Ingalls. If you already know something about Bjorka Ingalls, 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 Plot in 2001. By the way, he told us that Biarque means Little Bales. in Danish. When he was 31, he founded Bjarket Ingalls 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 Aids 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, Bjarki brought a housewarming present. I have a gift for you. 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, Biarki.

I had tried to get a coffee with them before we taped, but we couldn't make it happen. Bjorki Ingalls 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 Bjork A next week.

But Bjork, he's not in New York very much, and he's busy. He's really busy. He said he's going to call me sometime, so I actually took my phone off Duna to serve for the whole day. He didn't call. So I have a feeling he's just going to show up. You think? Yeah, I think so.

He's pretty, he's very amiable. I met designer Norraine 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. Oh, man. Anything. Anything.

Oh, my gosh. You know what? It can be anonymous, too. This feels very anonymous. Oh, man. And here is designer Kesee Tucker. 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. I was starting to think that either Bjorka Ingalls is kind of wonderful or maybe all his

employees were just lying to me. A week after my visit to the big offices, Bjarké showed up at my apartment, Moondust 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? Exactly. 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. No, I actually said, yeah, exactly, yeah.

And I thought, oh, they're building more salt sheds. 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. So my name in Danish would be Biage Engels. And I normally say in English,

it's like saying BRK quickly, BRK. The firm is how big now? We are probably around 700 architects. And you're in how many 8, 10 cities? Yeah, we are like in 7 cities. Copenhagen, New York, London, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Zurich, and Shanghai. 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.

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 the CEO. My role is really like the... Creative director? Creative direction, 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. So you're steering the ship in terms of what kind of projects do we want to do, though, in addition to design? Yeah, so what kind of projects 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, I have to make sure that that's the idea that we pursue together. How do you make sure that the person who had the idea gets proper credit? 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 is somehow sitting there and holding it 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 wouldn't 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 that,

this is my great idea. Then it's not going to be very fun, 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. 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 enter 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, right? So you're pitching that as the downside that he has to keep administering. Yeah, no, no, but in that sense, like, so he just started making more companies. Right. 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, 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. But like one or three percent. But wouldn't you like that? Great. Let's do it. 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. That's true. There are some systemic issues that would be great to figure out. I think you're even a one to two percent,

royalty to the estate would be who can we talk to about this? 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. Does it hurt your heart a little bit when the clients don't appreciate it? It's simply how it is. I had asked some architects at big about this very thing.

Here's Rachel Wilkins again. 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. 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's like, you know, people are going to take their wedding photos on my project one day, hopefully.

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 the architects from the movies, and there are characters. So I don't know.

What does that feel like? The challenge of an architect, you have to competing 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...

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... 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,

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... I think the person who wins the job says it like that. Yeah, 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 the sketch is

something you do to get to where you end up doing the art piece. Are you saying you personally are perpetually disappointed by not getting to build what you initially want? 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 dance. So, like, I would have been a billionaire a long time ago if I was like a... Does that mean you're not a billionaire? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, 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 illegible to be able to even compete. To be able to compete in that level of like the Hamburg Opera House you're saying. Exactly. You weren't trying to get that kind of job 10 years ago. 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 corona per month. What does that translate to? That's like $800. Okay. Because we had just come through a little financial collapse internally in the office, I had some hands with not a lot of work to do. I like when you say a little financial collapse. Somebody told me,

that you're a fan of oxymorons? No, exactly. I think the oxymoron is maybe the secret source to everything, but we can get into that. Can we get into that now? What do you mean by that? No, I do think that an oxymoron is the opposite of polarization, right? Because an oxymoron is a concept that has, as its constituent part,

seemingly mutually exclusive or diametrically opposite contradictory elements, right? A typical oxymoron would be utopian pragmatism. Because, let's say, utopia is this concept 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 come and meet you, I was actually very excited to meet you because, like, Freakonomics has actually been a book that I really enjoyed because, It is saturated and because of 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 unductored 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 be even more obvious, even more right in a way, even though they feel wrong. I feel like you speak in oxymorons, actually. 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. 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.

Yeah. And I was never that into Bob Dylan. I don't think he's more of an American phenomenon. But, but, but, but, but, uh, can I say there are a lot of Americans who aren't into Bob Dylan either. I love him, but, uh, yeah. But, but I, I say, like, I love the movie and I started listening to, uh, to his music. Oh, good.

But, but, but, and I think a lot of people who love Bob Dylan didn't like the movie or whatever, like, like, 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 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. If you want to live in a different world than the one that exists, you can always try to change it yourself. Bjorki is a father of two. His seven-year-old son Darwin lives here in New York.

When Bjarket 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. Bjorki 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. 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, you know, if my son is seven now, he could be like, he could have left home before he would have known 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 plus. where you could develop some homes that could maybe offset the cost of doing it. So is this actually happening or it's still a plan? 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.

What's the cost of that risk? That versus this. No, I asked you. So this was also infinitely cheaper. Okay. Because you basically establish the highway on the ground. You put a little lid on it. But there's got to be a bridge or a ramp somewhere down the way.

That's going to be expensive or no? Yeah, so there is the transition in either end that, of course, 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. Big has by now published several books. Bjorki brought up the first one when we sat back down. 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. 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? I love Yes is More. I think it's a great title. But is there a name for your philosophy about 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 Biarca Ingalls thinking about the principles? purpose of architecture? I mean, we can help you come up with one if you don't. No, I know, exactly like, no, 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 and blah, blah, do you believe that? I don't know.

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 over-define 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-guining, 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, Sir in 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. Are you allowed to recycle losing ideas?

We have the IP of, it is our IP. 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? 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. Yeah. just because we did it for someone else. I mean, but of course, we also don't want to repeat the same building.

And sometimes there's like discussions. You really don't. When I look at your buildings, I mean, some of them have similarities. There's some idiosyncrasies. And also there are certain subjects that you haven't, you know, fully explored yet. Like what? 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, very, very, yeah, I'm not going to 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 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 because they did this first one in this specific way, no other version could live, that would be like a huge loss. The way you talk about this stuff is very rare and inspiring to me. I think we'll 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? Interesting. I would say, I mean, 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. Martin Wise.

What your father do for a living? 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 with your father?

My father's name is Bonkaw Jensen. It's probably the two most common Danish names. But and then he said, no, yeah, his name is Kunborn. And he's, oh, yeah, and then he turns around to his friend and he says, this is Kinabongkoy's son. And then he says, who? He says, and 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 from fiber. So I called him up on the spot and said, like, you know, your legacy is, 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. She applied you to architecture school from what I... Yeah, I think it was a collaborative effort between my parents, but it was because I had probably intended to take a year off and enjoy my early youth, but I didn't have. 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. Someone mentioned to me just in a conversation, it was my wife who you wrote 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, but I don't know. You tell me. What do you think?

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 irreversible. or dishemonious, and you can suddenly see the potential beauty in them, and whatever art form, if it's a piece of literature or a poem, but architecture, of course, has the possibility to do with 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. So is that a yes, then?

Does it, is it a form of art? I think it's a, it is, you think of yourself as an artist? 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 the practice for 20 years. And we've definitely done some great and exciting and significant things. You're winning awards. The business is growing, yes. But at that point, I thought, like, I still haven't gotten an opera for it. And then I just realized, I'm not really getting there.

We've done some things, but I'm... 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? Yeah. 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 an architect that 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. It's not 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. 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. I mean, but again, I don't know that that is the drive. I think it is really the... But what was missing? 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, let's call it, and I think my mom was a very good dentist.

I mean, there's an artistry to it, to be fair. No, absolutely. I think there's a lot of aesthetics. Yeah, yeah. You don't want, like, a dentist that doesn't believe in aesthetics, too. to mess with your smile. But in that sense, 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, I remember when we got the job to do V-F57, imagine to contribute to the skyline of skylines, the kind of man-made mountain range

that is Manhattan. 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 than 50 years later, the Eiffel Tower

everybody hated. 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 manifested itself in these kind of eruptions. Do you like, I know you live here and in Copenhagen, but you're traveling all the time, I gather, right? Yeah. 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, It's 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. Yeah, but I think New York is similar to maybe 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 anymore. And you feel that about Burning Man? No, no, I'm saying it's still great. So what do you do there? Exactly, like, 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 backdoor 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 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 Naranya the same way twice. So the wardrobe is one way in there, and then you have to find another way into Naranya. So therefore, of course, when you return, you're not going to find what you found when you were 22, right? What's a building that you wish you had designed? I mean, I would have loved to have designed the Sydney Opera. Yeah.

100%. What do you love about it? 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 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... You're in favor of all that mashing up? 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 Utsin 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 frieca moment. It would be amazing if one day,

you know, we would do something like that. 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 Bjarka Ingalls to mean? 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 America, American architecture, you have Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Geary. Frank Lloyd Wright had turned 60 when he started work on falling water, Guggenheim, and Johnson Wax. So you have another 10 years to warm up. And the same is actually true for, I mean, of course, both of them, Frank Geary, 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 like in a very successful career by any standards, but what he will be remembered for hadn't been started. 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? Architecture is a little bit like Benjamin Button, right? That, like, again, if you're like an athlete, you should retire at 30, right? And also there's a feeling when you're, you're you're an athlete that every day past 25, you're declining.

Whereas you have the opposite, really. No, exactly, but it's frustrating when you're 25 in architecture. Yeah. But it definitely has its merits later in life. 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 I maybe envisioned it on a scale of eight, and, like, you were at 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. Cheers. 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-deaf 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 person at freakonomics.com or radio at freakonomics.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. It's funny, I read that Hagen-Dash. The founders tried to come up with the 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.

Is that true? Yeah.