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

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0:13Hey 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.

0:50There 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.

1:26That is the single best thing you can do to support the stuff we make. As always, thanks for listening. Here now is Better In Person with the architect, Bjarke Ingels.

1:41I know when you first went online, and you're Danish, so the URL was big, bjarkeingelsgroup.dk, which if you read it is big dick. That's on purpose, I assume? No, the thing is, I've been struggling with this ever since. So that was not a self-promotional URL. No, no, exactly. I'm sure that it's gone into the spam filter in a few places.

2:12This is Better in Person with Stephen Dubner and Bjarke Ingels. 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 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, or BIG.

2:53They 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. 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.

3:34This 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 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 Bjarke next week. But Bjarke, 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 Do Not Disturbed for a whole day.

4:09He didn't call. So I have a feeling he's just going to show up. You'll hear from him. You think? Yeah, I think so. He's pretty, he's very amiable. 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. Oh, man. Anything. Wide open. Anything. Oh, my gosh. And you know what? It can be anonymous, too. This feels very anonymous. Oh, man. And here is designer Casey Tucker. I'm really curious about his evolving take on the starting point for designing the building.

4:48I think he's a step ahead of us. 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? 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.

5:27No, I exactly said, yeah. Right? And I thought, oh, they're building more salt sheds. I saw this amazing looking shape. I had no idea what it was. I'd never heard your name. And then as it started to flesh out, I thought it was just amazing and different and vibrant. And then I started to hear about you. And it seems that you're kind of amazing and different and vibrant as well. So I really appreciate your being here. Can you just say your name in the Danish and English? 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. The firm is how big now?

6:07We are probably around 700 architects. And you're in how many? Eight, ten cities? Yeah, we are like in seven 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. Got it, got it.

6:43And 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.

7:24How 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 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.

8:00But 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, exactly.

8:40Like 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? Okay, so you're pitching that as the downside that he has to keep administering. Yeah, no, no, but in that sense, so he just started making more companies.

9:12Right. But the difference is like when he reaches five to 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. 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 like, wouldn't you like that?

9:49Great, 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 uh years of education versus salary it's hard to find something worse than architecture i assume you do fine because you're the the boss but how do you how do you think about that and also how do you persuade people to stay in it because i 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.

10:26And it takes a lot of talents that many people don't have, and then they're not rewarded very well. That's true. There's some systemic issues that would be great to figure out. I think even a 1 % to 2 % royalty to the estate would be... Who can we talk to about this? Game changer. 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.

11:18So 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 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

11:54so what's it feel like to actually design and create and then build and then stand in a building it's hard for me to really envision what that feels like other than a power trip I think if I if I had the ability to do what you do which I don't on many dimensions I think there would be a feeling like, yes, I 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 compete in competitions, and you have to win the competition.

12:38We just won 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 use. Is this really true? I've heard people say that architecture is not as cutthroat as one might think, rivalry between firms.

13:21I tended to not believe that to be true, but you're saying it may be. Yeah, but of course we are somehow competing. Like, you know, 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... I think the person who wins the job says it like that. Yeah, I know. I mean, I've lost more competitions than most human beings alive. But essentially, like... So the second thing is to this idea, what does it feel like?

14:02The 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're perpetually, you personally are perpetually disappointed by not getting to build what you initially want?

14:46In 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 a... Does that mean you're not a billionaire? 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. To be able to compete in that level of like the Hamburg opera house you're saying.

15:29Exactly. 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 krona per month. What does that translate to? That's like 800 bucks. 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.

16:08I think the oxymoron is maybe the secret sauce 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 like 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 blah but within that little uh constraint you could actually make a pragmatic utopia and and the funny thing is when you invited me to um to come in uh uh and and and meet you i was i was actually very excited to meet you because like uh Freakonomics has actually been um a book that i really enjoyed because uh it 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?

17:53But 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 be even more obvious, even more right in a way, even though they feel wrong. I feel like you speak in oxymorons, actually. Seriously.

18:39Like 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. Yeah. And I was never that into Bob Dylan. I think he's more of an American phenomenon. But... Can I say there are a lot of Americans who aren't into Bob Dylan either? I love him, but... But I would say, like, I love the movie, and I started listening to his music.

19:16Oh, good. 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 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.

20:01If 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.

20:40I happen 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 ever know that there was a prognite, 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.

21:22And there's even a few plots 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 versus this? So this was also infinitely cheaper. Okay. Because you basically establish the highway on the ground.

22:01You 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 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. Bjarke 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.

22:44But 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 architecture? 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?

23:24I mean, we can help you come up with one if you don't. No, I know exactly. 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, blah, blah, blah. Do you believe that? I don't know. 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?

24:00But 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 given form. In other words, to give form to the future. And in some way, like Søren 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 inhabit it were even born for a lost competition for an art museum.

24:48Are you allowed to recycle losing ideas? No, 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 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. When I look at your buildings, I mean, some of them have similarities.

25:31There's some idiosyncrasies and also there are certain subjects that you haven't 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, I'm not going to do it for you. but she has a very jarring vocal and the instrumentalization 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.

26:25And 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 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? Interesting. I would say, I mean, first of all, I think my parents are like an oxymoron, actually.