Search Engine x Better in Person

0:25Hello, Search Engine Nation 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.

1:06The 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.

1:46Some 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 hosted 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 gonna share our favorite episode so far. It's an interview Stephen did with the world-renowned architect, Bjarke Engels. This is the guy who built a power plant in Copenhagen with a ski slope on its roof.

2:23He'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 watched this. But if you want to see the video, which is really cool, we're linking to the video. There's a link in our show notes. You can just click and see the inside of Stephen Dubner's house where he keeps all his stuff. I'll let Stephen take it from here.

2:56This 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.

3:37They 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 printing 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'm 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.

4:18This 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 disturb for a whole day.

4:54He 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 a building.

5:32I 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.

6:11No, I exactly said, yeah. 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. 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 Engels. And I normally say in English, it's like saying B-R-K quickly, B-R-K. The firm is how big now?

6:51We 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. So my role is really like the... Creative director? Creative direction, exactly.

7:27Got it, 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. 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.

8:08How 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 like, then we don't really want your idea to be the best one because I wouldn't want my idea to be the best one.

8:45But 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, right? Yeah. 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.

9:24Like 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. 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.

9:56Right. But the difference is 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. 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?

10:33Great. 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.

11:15That's true. There are 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-changing. 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. 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?

12:07It'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.

12:55Thank you.

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15:58so what's it feel like to actually design and create and then build and then stand in a building it's hard for me to really envision what that feels like other than a power trip i think if i if i had the ability to do what you do which i don't on many dimensions i think there would be a feeling like yes i i made that and there would be an air of i think kind of cockiness or superiority. I don't know, maybe that is you. And, you know, we know 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.

16:42We 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... Is this really true? I've heard people say that architecture is not as cutthroat as one might think, rivalry between firms.

17:24I 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, a hamburger 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 mean I've lost more competitions than most human beings alive but but 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.

18:17Because 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. In that sense, you have to jump through so many hoops by architectural standards.

18:56I'm relatively young, I just turned 50, but that would be like age of retirement. I would have retired 10 years ago if I was ballet dancer. I would have been a billionaire a long time ago if I was like a - Does that mean you're not a billionaire? 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. 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.

19:38I was actually thinking right when I started big, Copenhagen got its first woman mayor. And she had an idea to do 5 ,000 homes within the next five years for a maximum of 5 ,000 kroner per month. 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. I think the oxymoron is maybe the secret sauce to everything, but we can get into that. Can we get into that now?

20:19What 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.

21:12And of course, it needs to plug into all of the practicalities of society. 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 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?

21:56but 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.

22:42Like 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 think he's more of an American phenomenon. Can I say there are a lot of Americans who aren't into Bob Dylan either? I love him, but... But I would say I love the movie, and I started listening to his music. Oh, good. And I think a lot of people who loved Bob Dylan didn't like the movie.

23:23However, 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. If you want to live in a different world than the one that exists, you can always try to change it yourself.

24:11Bjarke is a father of two. His seven-year-old son, Darwin, lives here in New York. When Bjarke was buying a home in Brooklyn Heights, a historic neighborhood with an elevated promenade, he heard about plans to renovate the BQE, the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. The BQE is a famously bad stretch of urban highway that runs beneath the promenade. The city's renovation plan called for a temporary highway built at promenade level. Bjarke thought he had a better idea and he pitched it to his new neighbors. I happen to have a chalkboard in my apartment, so he sketched out his vision. 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.

24:57I 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 problem. 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 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 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.

25:39And 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. 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.

26:16But 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. 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.