Freakonomics Radio - How a Great Architect Thinks_ with Bjarke Ingels _ Better in Person

0:00This 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.

0:32in 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.

0:58But 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 to if only out of a burning need to see what I actually look like. And if you like the show.

1:25please 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 Björke Ingels. I know when you first went online and you're Danish, so the URL was...

1:47Big Bjarke Ingalls Group dot DK, which if you read it is big dick. That's on purpose. I said no like the thing is like it's hot I've been struggling with this ever since but so that was not a self-promotional URL No, I know I say like yeah, I'm sure that it's gone into the spam filter in a few places This is better in person with Steven Dubner and Bjarke Ingalls When I first started thinking about who to have on the show I made a list many lists actually in one name always wound up near the top Björke Ingels. If you already know something about Björke 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 Björke means little bear in Danish. When he was 31, he founded Björke Ingels Group or BIG.

2:54They 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 Bjarke brought a housewarming present. I have a gift for you.

3:23It 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 them before we taped, but we couldn't make it happen. Bjarke Ingles 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 Bjorkay next week. But Bjorkay, 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 the whole day. He 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.

4:17I 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. 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. I think he's a step ahead of us. I was starting to think that either Biarka Ingalls is kind of wonderful or maybe all his employees were just lying to me. A week after my visit to the big offices, Biarka 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.

5:18I 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 yes. Right? And I thought, 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.

5:40and 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 in English. My name in Danish would be Bjagg-Engels. And I normally say in English, it's like saying BRK quickly, BRK. 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.

6:37My role is really like the creative direction. 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.

7:07and 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.

7:36where 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 that 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, this is my great idea. Then it's not going to be very fun. 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.

8:34As far as I know, there's no such thing as an architecture royalty. I've never heard of it. Maybe there is. No, I know 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 Okay, 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.

9:33But 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 3%. But like, 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.

10:01The 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 in 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.

10:31That's true. There are some systemic issues that would be great to figure out. I think even a one to two percent royalty to the estate would be... Who can we talk to about this? 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.

11:01We 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 gonna 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.

11:30When 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 work. And that, like, you know, people are going to take their wedding photos on my project one day, hopefully. So what's it feel like to...

11:57actually 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 cockiness or superiority. I don't know. Maybe that is you. 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. We 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

12:48Hamburg, 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 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.

13:44But again, we're not really competing against... I think the person who wins the job says it like that. 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. It even makes film...

14:11seem 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 the 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.

14:39the 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, 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 billion, a long time ago if I was like... Does that mean you're not a billion? Yeah, 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 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. I was actually thinking right when I started big,

15:38Copenhagen 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's 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 that 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. Because an oxymoron is a concept

16:26that has, as its constituent part, seemingly mutually exclusive or diametrically opposite contradictory elements. 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.

16:56as 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. But within that little constraint, you could actually make a pragmatic utopia. And the funny thing is when you invited me to to come and 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 co-authors ability to collect all of these incredible data sets, getting them from drug dealers and prostitutes and dating games and all kinds of random stuff.

17:50where you thought, why is an economist dealing with this? But it's because they were undocked data about things where we have a lot of assumptions out of preconception or prejudice. I think when you can go beyond that, you start understanding the world in a more real way. I would actually say 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.

18:32obvious, even more right in a way, even though they feel wrong. I feel like you speak in oxymorons, actually. No, no, no. Seriously. I mean, like you want to join, you want to be the person or a person who joins together things that weren't meant to be joined, that brings together some impossible combination. No, 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.

19:00And I was never that into Bob Dylan. I don't think he's more of an American phenomenon. But... But... 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. Oh, 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...

19:29The 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 of their identity or the right identity Was so provocative to them that like like this idea Did you you really want to label things and now it like 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.

20:08Björke is a father of two. His seven-year-old son Darwin lives here in New York. When Björke 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. Björke 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.

21:05maybe 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.

21:30So 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? No, I asked, yes. So this was also infinitely cheaper.

21:58because you're basically established on the ground. You put a little lid on it. But there's got to be a bridge or 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 sweet friends of mine that 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. Björke brought up the first one when we sat back down.

22:29Our 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.

22:53If your definition is who or what you are against, then you are by definition a follower in reverse. Because the others said 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...

23:10philosophy 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. 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, blah, blah, blah. Do you believe that?

23:39I 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, 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-geaning, 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 Sergeant Kierkegaard, I really believe that life is lived moving forward, but it's understood looking backwards. In a project,

24:35Let'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?

25:05I 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 discussions. You really don't. When I look at your buildings, I mean, some of them have similarities. There are 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, I'm not gonna do it for you. But she has a very jarring vocal and the instrumentation is like very sort of screaming electronic, right?

26:04Then 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. And 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,

27:02I 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. What did 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 of your father? My father's name is Bonkhor Jensen. It's probably the two most common Danish names. And then he said, no, yeah, his name is Bonkhor Jensen. Oh, yeah. And then he turns around to his friend and he says, this is Bonkhor's son. And then he says, who? And then he says,

27:59the wise man from fiber. And I was like, 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, your legacy is secured. And then he said, you have a mother with dragon blood. I never saw him in quiet what he actually meant with dragon blood, but I kind of get it. She applied you to architecture school.

28:29from 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 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. This episode of Better in Person is presented by ChatGPT.

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30:00mentioned 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 see it in a year or 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 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

30:57or 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 whatever art form, if it's a piece of literature or poem or, but architecture of course has the possibilities to do 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? Is it a form of art? I think it's a... Do you think of yourself as an artist? I definitely think of myself as an artist, but my canvas is reality. In 2020...

31:56I made it 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 definitely done some grading and signing in. You're winning awards. The business is growing, yes. But at that point I thought like, I still haven't gotten an opera for this. And then I just realized I'm not really getting there.

32:25we'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 a kind of national library. 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.

32:52these 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...

33:19in the secret or in the power of manifestation as some kind of a... You might need to start. 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.

33:42It 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. 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 her this quote. She said like...

34:12You can't really say it as a dentist, but dentists love drilling in teeth. 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. Absolutely, I think there's a lot of aesthetics. You don't want a dentist that doesn't believe in aesthetics to mess with your smile. But 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. I remember when we got the job to do VF57, imagine to contribute to the skyline of skylines, the kind of man-made mountain range that is Manhattan. Do you like 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...

35:10probably, 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 in 50 years later. They love 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...

36:01and density and that manifests 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...

36:20I mean, it sounds ridiculous to say it fell off the global radar in a way in that mostly when people from outside of New York talk about it 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. Yeah, but I think New York is 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, I'm saying it's still great. What do you do there? 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.

37:17everybody 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 as 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 prophecies. And therefore it's also because they have such notoriety and a lot of people have had great pivotal moments in both places at a certain time in their life. But the truth is you cannot enter Narnia the same way twice. Like so the wardrobe is one way in there and then you have to find another way into Narnia.

38:14So 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. 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.

38:44that you can actually circumnavigate the two pavilions that are the halls. There's a concert hall and an overhaul. 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. You're in favor of all that mashing up?

39:14But 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 Utsun had this insistence on what he called the additive that any kind of expression should be able to be made with industrialized repetitive elements.

39:44So 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 to freak a moment. It would be amazing if one day 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 Bjarke Engels to mean? The simplest answer is that I would love...

40:14If 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. So you have another 10 years to warm up. And the same is actually true for, I mean of course, both of them.

40:43Frank 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 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?

41:12Architecture 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 the feeling when 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. But it definitely has its merits later in life.

41:38I 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 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.

42:09Thanks for checking out this very first episode of Better in Person, but remember this is a video show, so if you want to see it in all its high-def glory, just go to the Freakonomics YouTube channel. We will be publishing 10 episodes there of this first season of Better in Person. Let me know what you think.

42:27Our 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 Haagen-Dazs, the founders tried to come up with a name that sounds Danish.

42:57and there's nothing Danish sounding about it. It also includes letters that don't exist in the Danish alphabet. Is that true? Yeah. 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.