How a Great Architect Thinks ft. Bjarke Ingels | Better in Person

Key Takeaway

Turn an ambitious but vague aspiration into a shared, specific commitment. Write down the kind of opportunity you want to earn, say it aloud to the people who can help you pursue it, and decide in advance what you are willing to invest to be ready when it appears. Ingels’s studio made a public bucket list and agreed to overinvest in target projects; within two years, it had won major commissions aligned with that goal.

Episode Overview

Steven Dubner talks with architect Bjarke Ingels about how BIG generates original ideas, balances utopian ambition with practical constraints, and designs buildings as contributions to public life. Ingels also explains why shared credit, candid ambition, and a willingness to combine apparent opposites help his firm pursue unusually ambitious work.

Full Transcript

Transcript of How a Great Architect Thinks ft. Bjarke Ingels | Better in Person from Freakonomics Radio. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

This episode of Better Imperson is presented by ChatGpt. Put ChatGpt to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Download the new ChatgPT desktop app today. I know when you first went online and you're Danish, so the the URL was biggroup.dk, which if you read it is big dick. That's on purpose, I assume. No, like the thing is like it's I've been struggling with this ever since. But so that was not a a self-promotional URL. No, no, exactly. Like I'm sure that it's gone into the spam filter in a few places.

Hey there, it's Steven Dubner. You may know me, but it's okay if you don't, from Freconomics, the books with my friend Steve Levit and then Freconomics Radio. And now I am doing this a TV talk show. It's called Better in Person. Here's the pitch. If freconomics is about how things work, then better in person is about how people work. 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.

Bjork. If you already know something about Bjork Ingles, you'll understand why I wanted him. And if you don't, well, you can thank me later. He is an architect in New York City and many other places. And there is a chance that he will go down as one of the greats. He started his first studio called Plot in 2001. Look how young he was. By the way, he told us that Bjke means little bear in Danish. When he was 31, he founded Bjel's group or big. Let me show you a few things they have created.

The spiral in New York City, Lego House back in Denmark. They're currently building a baseball stadium for the old Oakland A's who are moving to 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, Bj 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 Bjark. I had tried to get a coffee with him before we taped, but we couldn't make it happen. Bjork Engles 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. So, we're talking to BR next week. Yeah, but 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. He didn't call. So, I have a feeling he's just going to show from him. Yeah, I think so. Um, he's pretty he's very amiable. 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 god. You know what? It can be anonymous, too.

This feels very anonymous. Oh, man. Um, 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. Nice. So, I'm thinking that um either Bca Engles is kind of wonderful on a variety of dimensions or all of his employees are lying to me. But eventually Bjke showed up at my apartment. 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 Westside Highway and they're those um maybe salt sheds that the highway department uses there. They're just No. Exactly. Yeah. And I thought they're building more salt sheds. Like I saw this amazing looking shape. I had no idea what it was. I'd never heard your name and then as it started to flesh out I thought it was just amazing and different and vibrant and then uh 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 you being here. Can you just say your name in the Danish Danish and English? Exactly. Like uh so my name is in Danish would be English and uh I normally say in English uh it's like saying BRK quickly. BRK. The firm is how big now? Uh we are probably around 700 architects. And you're in how many? 8 10 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 I you don't really need a title when you already named the company after yourself, but uh but I am not uh I'm not the CEO. Uh my role is is really like the creative director. Creative direction. Exactly. Like and and in that sense, I I do have an important um take on a lot of things, but my focus is really what we're doing, what we should be doing, and and how we're doing it. Like, so you're steering the ship in terms of what kind of projects do we want to do though in addition to Yeah.

Yeah. So, what kind of projects do we want to do? Like, 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. it. 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 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 a ton of iterations and and put putting everything out there so that the hurea moment can present itself. If everybody's somehow sitting there and holding a little bit back because [clears throat] they want to make sure that they get full credit for whatever idea they come with, that also means that then then we don't really want your idea to be the best one because I I wouldn't want my idea to be the best one.

But also, if it's if it's 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 a this is my great idea, then it's 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. Um, but you made it. Um, as far as I know, there's no such thing as an architecture royalty. I've never heard of it. Maybe there is. No. No. Yeah. Exactly. like one of my good friends, he's a kind of serial entrepreneur and and we found that there were so many similarities between the work we do and and also why like after having done this for 25 years, I still love it and and it still feels fresh and and that is simply because I never enter the stage of administration whereas like he would he would make a 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.

So you're pitching that as the downside that he have has to keep administering. Yeah. No, no, no, but in that sense like so, so he just started making more companies, right? But but the difference is like when when he reaches five to six years and and it starts running, uh 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 So uh 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 like but like one or 3%.

Oh yeah. But like wouldn't you like that? It would be 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 uh years of education versus salary, it's hard to find something worse in architecture. I assume you do fine because you're the the boss, but 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 and it takes a lot of talents that many people don't have and then they're not rewarded very well. No, it's true. There are some uh some some systemic issues that would be great to uh to figure out. I I think I think you're I even even a 1 to 2% uh royalty to the estate would be uh who can we talk to about game changing like you know like uh 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 yeah, for for for our own benefit or like let's say for the love of that like e even though the clients m 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.

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

The challenge of an architect, you have to uh you have to compete in competitions and you have to win the competition. Um we just won this uh the new opera in Hamburg. That's really a a dream job. It's on an island in the middle of the Hoffen city, like the the port city of of Hamburg. Hamburg is like the Venice of of Northern Germany. And of course, we have to compete with some of our friends and colleagues, some of the best architects uh in the world, but it's not a competition where you have to defeat your opponent.

It's not a boxing match. So, in that sense, you you're not really competing with them, although they are your competitors. You are somehow trying to make the absolute best project that you can uh 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. Yeah. I mean, but of course, we are somehow uh competing like, you know, a Hamburg is only going to get one opera.

Uh and uh and and unless we really budge 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 uh fiercely to get those 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' I've lost more competitions than most human beings alive. But but uh but essentially like and and so so the second thing is uh 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 that you're dreaming of right and and the same with a with a sculptor maybe 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 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 in that sense it just you have to jump through so many hoops by architectural standards I'm I'm I'm relatively young I I just turned 50 but you know that 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. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. So, so, so, uh, so in that sense, um, it it has sort of taken me a quarter of a century to, uh, assemble a team and, and sort of gain the experience and the notoriety to become allegible to, 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 you weren't trying to get that kind of job 10 years ago. I was dreaming of it, but I I was nowhere near it.

I was actually thinking uh right when I started big, Copenhagen got its first um woman mayor, and she had an idea to do 5,000 uh homes within the next five uh years for a maximum of 5,000 krona per month in What's that translate to? That's like 800 bucks. Okay. because we had just come come through a little uh financial collapse uh internally in the office. I had some some hands with not a lot of I like when you say a little financial collapse. Somebody somebody told me that you're a fan of oxymorons.

No, no, exactly. Exactly. Like I think the the oxymoron is maybe the secret source to to everything, but we can get into that. Oh, can we get into that now? What do you mean by that? No, no. I I I do think that an oxymoron is the opposite of polarization, right? Because an oxymoron is a concept that that has as its constituent part seemingly mutually exclusive or diametrically opposite uh contradictory elements, right? A typical oxymoron would be u utopian pragmatism. uh uh because uh let's say utopia is this like concept from from literature of a place so perfect that it it it can't exist in reality.

Uh and pragmatism is dealing with the world as it is. Uh 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 uh constraint you could actually make a pragmatic utopia. And and the funny thing is when you invited me to um to come and uh uh and and and meet you, I was I was actually very excited to meet you because like u freconomics has actually been um a book that I really enjoyed because uh it it it is saturated and because of your your your co-author's ability to sort of collect all of these incredible data sets, getting them from uh drug dealers and prostitutes and dating games and all kinds random stuff where where you thought like why is an economist dealing with this?

But it's because they were undoed data uh about things where we have a lot of assumptions out of preconception or or prejudice and I think when you can go beyond that you start sort of understanding the world in a in a in a more real way. And I would actually say like in our work simply by not boxing things into pre-established identities you can create a space of opportunity where you might see new potential relationships that may seem contradictory or surprising but can actually re be even more obvious even more right in a way even though they feel wrong.

I feel like you speak in oxymorons actually. No. Yeah. 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 in different boxes. I mean, one movie that I really enjoyed last year was um Complete Unknown. Yeah. And um I I was never that into Bob Dylan. I I don't think he's more of an American phenomenon, but but uh can I say there are a lot of Americans who aren't into Bob Dylan either.

I love him, but uh but I I say like I I love the movie and I started listening to uh to his music. Oh, good. But but and I think a lot of people who love Bob Dylan didn't like the movie or whatever. 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 of their identity or the right identity, right?

uh was so provocative to them that like like this idea that 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 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. Bark is a father of two. His seven-year-old son Darwin lives here in New York. When BRK was buying a home in Brooklyn Heights, a historic neighborhood with an elevated prominade, 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 Prominade. The city's renovation plan called for a temporary highway built at prominade level. Bjke thought he had a better idea and he pitched it to his new neighbors. You basically have Brooklyn Heights. Okay. Then then you have the Prominade and here you have three lanes in both directions. So then you have these BMS that protect the park, the Brooklyn Bridge Park. Uh so you have like one of the best parks in New York City here and the river is over there.

The river the river is basically let's say these are these are peers. So the river's here and you have Manhattan over here. Right. This burm has been built as a kind of nice backdrop visually for the for the park, but also to shelter the park from the noise. I see. From the from the highway. Right. Yeah. We looked at it and and the 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 [snorts] ever know that there was a proven, right?

So then we thought what you could do maybe cut a little bit into the the backside of these BMS. You can do the six lanes. You put a lid on it and you know you can repair it and make it a prominade. 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 uh some uh 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 only time where we did a community meeting where we got an applause. Uh but uh but everybody could see that this this was probably better. Eventually, they stopped doing what they were doing. They they got a new group to look into it and we were sort of invited to to assist in in in that process. What's the cost of that versus this? No. No. I Yeah. 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 ramp somewhere down the way. That's going to be expensive or no? Yeah. So, there is the transition uh in in either end. That of course but but like I I like to say that some 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.

Bjke brought up the first one when we sat back down. Uh, our first book in the form of a of a graphic novel about architecture is called Yes Is More. And Yes. 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. Right? But if your definition is who or what you are against, then you are by definition a follower in reverse because the the others set the agenda.

You just say the opposite, right? I love Yeses more. I think it's a great title, but um is there a name for your philosophy about ar like what you're describing right now? I'm 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 bure thinking about the purpose of architecture? I mean we can help you come up with one if you don't have. No, I know exactly like No, but I but I think I have have a feeling that that by now maybe I I would say like at 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.

Do you believe that? I don't Yeah. like I I was never good at it but the but then at some point um because we had grown a little bit I thought okay so let's try to say and and I always had this idea that if you write things down they almost die immediately like like if you overdefine things um there there's no wiggle room for for life within it right so but but then I thought like okay what what is the the least reductive or constraining statement that could be said that should be true for us and And then I tapped into this idea that that the Danish word for design is formguning 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 like in some way like like son Kirigard I really believe that life is lived moving forward but it's understood looking backwards. Right. Giving form to the future does seem like a good way to describe the projects that big takes on. For example, this new building for the University of Kansas's architecture and design school. The building is called Makers Cube. To make exposing everything look cool takes a lot more work and care and coordination [clears throat] than to hide it all.

Every building needs to do something for the community. Regardless of what the client wants, it needs to be a good neighbor. provides [clears throat] something beyond what was asked of us in a project. Let's say just like the the Hamburg opera that we that we just won. I would say elements of it, some of the ideas that inhabited were were even born for a lost competition for an art museum in Are you allowed to recycle losing ideas? No, we we we have the the IP of uh it is our IP.

When you enter a competition, do they pay you for instance to to attempt um to win the competition? And if so, does that win them any rights at all to uh the design? I mean, of course, like some clients want to make sure that they they own the IP of of of the work we do for them. No one no one wants to get sued for, you know, we 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 and some sometimes there's like when I look at your buildings, I mean, some of them have similarities. There's some idiosyncrasies and and also there's there are certain subjects that you haven't, you know, fully explored yet, like what in music, the cover song. Mhm. One that just comes to mind is like uh a Swedish band called The Knife, one of my favorites. They have a song called Heartbeats. It's a very like and the the lead singer, she has this very very Yeah, I'm not I'm not going to do it for you.

Uh but but uh uh she has a very jarring uh vocal and the instrument sensation is like very sort of uh screaming electronic, right? Then Jose Gonzalez, another Swedish uh musician did this beautiful uh guitar version of it. It's clearly the same uh song, like the same tune. Yeah. Yeah, like let's say the 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 uh other Swedish band, Amazon, did a third version of it.

And they're all great songs, and the world would be uh a lesser place if they didn't all three exist. And imagine if just just because they did this first one in this specific way, no other version could live. That would be like a huge loss. This episode of Better Imperson is presented by ChatGpt. Chat GPT work moves beyond answers into getting real work done. It's a new experience in chat GPT for bigger multi-step projects across web, mobile, and desktop. You can give chat GPT work a goal and have it gather context, choose an approach, create the output, and continue iterating all while you stay in control.

It can help turn messy inputs into useful outputs like briefs, spreadsheets, dashboards, presentations, prototypes, landing pages, and workflows. You can even ask ChatGpt work to take on entire workflows with a single request. Here's an example. It can turn customer research into a campaign brief. Use that brief to create marketing assets and adapt those assets for different markets, carrying context through every step. Put chat GPT to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects. Download the new ChatGpt desktop app today. The way you talk about this stuff is very rare and inspiring to me and I think will be inspiring to a lot of people.

And so the next natural question for most people is well how do I get some of that whether it's for me or my children. Interesting. Okay. So I would say I mean first of all I I think my parents are like an oxymoron actually. I would say objectively they're both very smart. We have a a father who's incredibly sort of smart and wise. What did your father do for a living? He's um he's a engineer. He graduated from Danish Technical University. He uh reverse engineered how to make fiber optics and uh and started the production of fiber optics.

And it's kind of funny the moment that I remember that I was the most proud of my dad uh was right after he retired. I was at a party in Copenhagen and these sort of youngish men came over and said um uh what's the name of your father? My father's name is Bongo Yensen is probably the two most common Danish names. So um but uh and and and then he said, "Oh yeah, his name is Kong." Oh yeah. And then he turns around to his friend and he says, "This is Kilbongo son." And then he says, "Who?" He says, "And then he says, "The the the wise man from fiber." And I was like uh and I was like sort of that imagine that the young lions in in the company they refer to him as the wise man from Viber.

So I called him up on the spot and said like you know your legacy is is is secured you know. And then he said you have a mother with dragon blood. And I I never sort of inquired what he actually meant with dragon blood but I kind of get it. She she applied you to architecture school from what I Yeah. I think it was it was a collaborative effort between my parents, but it was because I had probably intended to take a year off uh and enjoy um my my early youth.

But uh um 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 and and then I had been accepted at architecture school. So it uh it worked out well. Someone mentioned to me just in a conversation, it was my wife who you rode up in the elevator with. Um, 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 um often, you know, huge across across ages, across many, many people. So, you're an architect. I would assume that you like that characterization, but I don't know. You tell me. What do you think? I mean, not that it's a pissing match, but I I think one one important uh distinction, one fundamental difference is that the other arts uh reflect Yeah. or comment or represent reality. And and great art will expand your perception of reality.

It can a beautiful piece of music can 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 and you know what whatever art form if it's a piece of literature or poem or but architecture of of course has the possibility to do all that but 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 uh that we inhabit.

So is that a yes then does it is it a form of art? I think it's a it is do you think of yourself as an artist? Uh I I definitely think of myself an as an artist but my canvas is is reality in 2020. I I made a kind of confessional because it's sometimes you can also u shield yourself against disappointment and failure by not truly confessing uh your dreams. Right. So and at that point I had the practice for 20 years and and we we definitely done some some great and exciting winning awards the business is growing.

Yes. But at that point I thought like I I'm I still haven't gotten an opera for like and then then I just realized I'm not really getting there. Uh we we've done some things, but so so then I ended up making a bucket list of a I think I put an opera house, a filmonic, an airport, uh a stadium, and a and a library or like a kind of national library, right? And then I gave speeches uh in the studio about why this was important. Then I got everybody to agree that we would be willing to to overinvest up to 25% of our earnings to win these kinds of opportunities when they presented themselves because there's also in architecture there is this catch 22 that no one will ever entrust you with an airport until you've already done an airport.

The same is true for all of these. So, but simply by making that confession to myself and to everybody around me, within less than two years, we had already won the filmonic in Prague and uh and the airport in Zurich. So, it it felt I mean, and I don't believe in in the secret or in the power of manifestation as some kind of a uh you might need to esoteric. Exactly. But but I think where where it is true that by being brutally honest to yourself and the world, everybody can understand a little bit clearer what it is.

Uh so in that sense there is a certain manifestation in in in 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. Uh I mean I I but I but again I don't know that that is the drive. I think it is really the but what was missing.

My my mom's a dentist, right? And uh and I I I love her this quote. She said like you can't really say it as a dentist, but dentists love drilling in teeth, you know, like uh so so like so if you have a craft Yeah. Let's call it and and I think my 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. Uh you don't you don't want like a a a dentist that doesn't believe in aesthetics to to mess with your smile.

But in that sense like so in that for for an architect to to be able to paint on that canvas. Yeah. Which is going to be the opera in Hamburg or the filmonic in Prague. Yeah. That's the can and you know the first like I I remember when when we got the job to do V57 imagine to contribute to the skyline of skylines the kind of ma man-made mountain range that is uh Manhattan. Do you like um 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 that like the building I also know that all these buildings in history um go up and everyone hates them at first and 50 years later they love the Eiffel Tower.

Everybody hated. I think the skyline of of New York is this uh collective art artwork that's not about the the greatness of of the individual buildings. It it's really about almost like the raw energy of of of of of commerce and uh and and density uh and and and that manifests itself in these kind of eruptions. Do you like um 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 um I feel like New York kind of fell off the I mean it sounds ridiculous to say fell off the global radar in a way in that mostly when people from outside of New York talk about it the last 20 or 30 years it's about what a difficult place it is a dangerous place a dirty expensive place but we who live here think it's um you know marvelous difficult but marvelous I'm just curious what you think about it yeah but I I think I think New York is similar to it's maybe it's similar to maybe Burning Man I'm 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.

And you feel that about Burning Man? No, no. I'm saying I'm saying I'm saying it's it's it's still great. So, uh, what do you do there? Yeah, exactly. You know, I mean, I I like to mostly just in in in I I would say both places are similar in the sense that um there is no host at Burning Man and there is also no single identity in New York, but everybody brings their agame. 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 the kind of crazy and you also have like this kind of you know like a a back door down a stair and then there's something incredible in a different way and and that happens in in both places because the absence of a single unifying identity uh creates this kind of canvas for a cacaphony of of offerings uh and and policies and therefore it's also because they have such notoriety and a lot of people have had great pivotal moments in both places at at a certain time in their life.

But the truth is you cannot enter Narnia the same way uh twice like so the wardrobe is is one way in there and and then you have to find another way into Narnia. So so therefore of course when you return uh you're not going to find what you found when you were 22, right? What's a building that um you wish you had designed? I mean, I would have loved to have designed uh the Sydney Opera. Ah, yeah. Uh 100%. What do you love about it? It's it's a it's an opera house, right?

So, um 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 circumn the two pavilions that are the the halls. There's a concert hall and an overhaul. And then on top of this incredible, incredibly generous public invitation, you have these pavilions that are like light and resting. And um they are evocative of Chinese pagodas, of Gothic vaults, of uh Mayan temples, but uh you're in favor of all that mashing up.

But but but they're 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 and then also it has this underlying rigor that it's not just some kind of empty gesture because Uten 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 he 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 FA moment. It would be amazing if one day uh uh you know, we would do something like that. Do you um do you think about your legacy maybe long after you're you're gone? Do you think about what your name 50 years from now, let's say, what would you like Barkca Engles to mean? I I mean the the simplest answer is that I would love if uh 50 years from now uh I will be remembered for for work I haven't done yet because like uh Frank Lord Wright actually the two great Franks of American architecture you have Frank Wright and Frank Giri Frankl Wright had turned 60 uh when he started work on falling water Guggenheim and uh and Johnson wax so you have another 10 years to warm up exact and and and the Same is actually true for I mean of course both of them Frank Frank Giri he had turned 60 before he started the uh the Guggenheim in Bilva and and Disney concert hall and and and all of that he may have done the fish in Barcelona like a few but 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? Architecture is a little bit like Benjamin Button, right? That uh like again if you're like an athlete Yeah. you you should retire at at at 30, right? And also there's a 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.

Yeah. But uh but but it definitely has its uh 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 like I maybe envisioned it on a scale of eight and like you were a 12. So I'm so um 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. Yeah. Cheers. Yeah. Thank you so much for coming. It's really I I just like I like having a house where Engles has been. I'm not kidding. Feels really good. It's funny. I read that Hagen Dash from the Bronx, the founders try to come up with a name that sounds Danish and there's nothing Danish sounding about it. And it also includes letters that don't exist in the Danish alphabet. Is that true? Yeah. [snorts] Thanks again to ChatGpt for sponsoring today's episode of Better in Person.

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