Search Engine x Better in Person

The Search Engine host opens by announcing that the show will begin experimenting with video. In November, the team is moving into its own studio, equipped with cameras as well as microphones, and plans to start publishing video in 2027. The host jokes that “the moving image was invented in 1888” and Search Engine will finally begin experimenting with it nearly 140 years later. The show will remain an audio program; the motivation is that more people now discover things through video, and the host increasingly watches video himself. He says that in 2026 he became inspired by watching people work on camera and had the feeling that “other people are having fun,” so Search Engine wants to try it too. He warns listeners that the team will be “throwing spaghetti at the wall”: some experiments may work, while others may quietly disappear. As an example of a successful audio-to-video translation, the host shares an interview from Steven Dubner’s Freakonomics project Better in Person. Dubner records from his house, preserving the sensibility of Freakonomics while making the setting visual. Because Search Engine is still audio-only, this episode carries the interview’s audio, while the description links to the video version on Freakonomics’ YouTube channel.

Steven Dubner introduces Better in Person’s guest, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, whose firm is known as BIG, or Bjarke Ingels Group. Dubner lists projects including the twisting Via 57 West building in New York, the Lego House in Denmark, and a planned stadium for the former Oakland A’s in Las Vegas. Ingels is also working with NASA and the 3D-printing company Icon on ways to construct buildings on the Moon using mostly lunar dust as raw material. Because the interview is recorded in Dubner’s recently moved-into living room, Ingels brings a housewarming gift: synthetic moon dust made for the NASA project. Dubner describes it as fine gray beach sand—or “the remains of your favorite pet.” Before the interview, Dubner visits BIG’s downtown Brooklyn office after failing to arrange coffee with Ingels. Employees Rachel Wilkins, Noreen Chang, and Casey Tucker describe him as amiable, hardworking, and especially interesting in how he approaches the starting point of a building’s design. Ingels does not call as promised, leading Dubner to speculate that he might simply appear. A week later, Ingels does show up at Dubner’s apartment with the moon dust. They begin by discussing Via 57 West, which Dubner first mistook for a new salt shed because of its unusual silhouette. Ingels explains the Danish pronunciation of his name and says BIG now employs about 700 architects across seven cities: Copenhagen, New York, London, Barcelona, Los Angeles, Zurich, and Shanghai.

Dubner asks Ingels how he balances commercial realities with creativity and whether he is effectively the company’s CEO. Ingels says his role is creative direction rather than administration: he helps decide what projects BIG should pursue and how to win them, but his job is not necessarily to originate every brilliant idea. Instead, he wants the firm to recognize and pursue the best idea whoever generated it. Ingels says BIG avoids assigning individual ownership of ideas. The team creates a “primordial soup” through many iterations, putting possibilities into the open until a eureka moment appears. If people withhold ideas to protect credit, the firm may fail to pursue the strongest proposal. He also dislikes the prospect of spending the next decade turning someone else’s idea into reality while that person repeatedly reminds everyone that it was theirs. Dubner points out that architects usually receive no royalties after a building is completed and sold, even though they created it. Ingels agrees that this is a systemic problem and welcomes the idea of a one- or two-percent resale royalty, similar to limited royalties paid to artists’ estates in parts of Europe. Dubner also notes that architecture requires extensive education and talent but has unusually low average pay. Ingels agrees the industry should be more profitable, but says architects accept difficult economics because architecture combines artistic integrity with technical liability and is often practiced for love of the work.

Ingels explains why he likes oxymorons. He calls them the opposite of polarization because they combine apparently contradictory elements. His example is “utopian pragmatism”: utopia describes an ideal place that cannot exist in reality, while pragmatism deals with the world as it is. Architecture can combine them by creating an ideal corner of the world that still works within society’s practical constraints. He connects this approach to Freakonomics. Ingels says he admired the show’s willingness to examine unexpected data about drug dealers, prostitutes, dating, and other subjects that economists were not conventionally expected to study. Those datasets challenge assumptions and prejudices. Similarly, BIG tries not to place projects into pre-established categories, because apparently contradictory relationships may produce something more useful and obvious than an orthodox solution. Ingels illustrates the idea through Bob Dylan. After watching the film A Complete Unknown, despite previously not being very interested in Dylan, he began listening to Dylan’s music. Ingels was struck by how Dylan’s early supporters embraced the part of him that resembled their own identity, then reacted negatively whenever Dylan exceeded their definition of what he was supposed to be. Ingels’s broader point is that people often demand fixed identities—someone must be “here” or “there”—whereas creative work can become powerful by moving between categories. His book title Yes Is More expresses the same preference for adding possibilities rather than defining oneself by opposition.

Ingels describes a proposal he developed after buying a home in Brooklyn Heights and learning about plans to renovate the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway, or BQE. The highway runs beneath the neighborhood’s elevated promenade. The city’s proposed temporary solution would have put a six-lane highway on temporary stilts at promenade level, potentially leaving Ingels’s seven-year-old son unaware of the original promenade until he had left home. Using a chalkboard in his apartment, Ingels sketched an alternative. The plan would cut slightly into the berms behind the existing roadway, keep the six lanes at ground level, place a lid over them, repair the highway, and restore the promenade above it. Ingels said this would preserve traffic capacity while creating roughly ten hectares of new parkland. A few development parcels could potentially help offset the cost. He presented the idea at a Brooklyn Heights community meeting, where he says it was unusually well received. The city eventually stopped pursuing the original approach, brought in a new group to study the problem, and invited BIG to assist. When Dubner asks about cost, Ingels says the alternative would be “infinitely cheaper” because it keeps the highway on the ground and adds a relatively simple lid, although transitions at either end would still require work. He quotes a Swedish friend’s T-shirt: “If you think good architecture is expensive, then try bad architecture.”

Dubner asks whether architecture is the highest form of art, citing his wife’s view that buildings affect behavior across generations and large populations, unlike a painting that viewers experience more individually. Ingels answers that architecture differs fundamentally from arts that reflect or represent reality. Music, literature, and visual art can expand people’s perception of reality, but architecture produces the reality people inhabit. He therefore considers himself an artist whose canvas is reality. Ingels says architecture’s large, expensive canvas also makes it unusually difficult. A painter can generally make the painting they imagine, but an architect must pass through clients, competitions, budgets, regulations, and construction before reaching the actual work. He describes architecture as a lifelong art form, almost like “Benjamin Button”: athletes may decline after their twenties, while architects can become more capable with age and experience. In 2020, after two decades of practice, Ingels made a public “bucket list” for BIG: an opera house, a philharmonic, an airport, a stadium, and a national library. He persuaded the studio to overinvest as much as 25% of its earnings to pursue such opportunities, partly because architecture has a catch-22: clients rarely entrust an architect with an airport or opera house until the architect has already designed one. Within two years, BIG had won projects for a philharmonic in Prague and an airport in Zurich. Ingels says this was not mystical manifestation; stating the ambition honestly made it easier for everyone to understand and act on it.

Ingels views New York’s recent skyline changes more positively than many critics. He sees the cluster of supertall towers built over the last 15–20 years as a collective artwork expressing commerce, density, and the city’s raw energy, rather than judging each building only by conventional standards of taste. He compares New York to Burning Man: neither has a single host or identity, so people bring their strongest offerings and contribute according to their abilities. The resulting “cacophony” makes both places unpredictable and repeatedly renews them; one cannot enter Narnia—or New York—the same way twice. Asked which building he wishes he had designed, Ingels immediately names the Sydney Opera House. He admires how an institution that might seem elitist is placed within an accessible public landscape of stairs, while the roof forms evoke Chinese pagodas, Gothic vaults, and Mayan temples without being reducible to any one tradition. He also praises architect Jørn Utzon’s structural rigor: the shells could be produced from repetitive industrial elements, an insight supposedly prompted by peeling an orange. Dubner asks what Ingels wants his name to mean fifty years from now. Ingels hopes to be remembered for work he has not yet done. He points to Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Gehry, both of whom produced defining work after turning 60. Dubner closes by saying Ingels has accomplished more than expected but may not have truly started yet; Ingels responds with a toast.