In part 2 of Kenneth Frampton’s Scaffold interview, we focus on his own experiences - from his early desire to become a farmer, and the long hesitation that kept him from starting a family, and his regrets around leaving architectural practice for a life of writing. 

These biographical threads are woven through his encounters with key thinkers – from Herbert Marcuse and Tomas Maldonado to Juhani Pallasmaa and Hannah Arendt – and with buildings like Corringham and Aalto’s Villa Mairea and the transformation in perspective they represent.

The discussion moves between the question of anti-capitalist architecture, the inundation of images in contemporary life, and the importance of what Frampton calls the microcosmos – architecture as the creation of “a small world” where society can begin to recognise itself. 

Along the way, Frampton reflects on what it might mean not to separate the reality of work from the pleasure of life.

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. 

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Architectural historian Kenneth Frampton remembers the exact moment of his political awakening.

Arriving in the United States in 1965, flying over the blazing island of Manhattan and suddenly grasping the visibility of capitalist power there—“a ferocious panorama” of light, cars and consumption that stood in stark contrast to what he calls the “concealed” capitalism of mid-century Britain. From that moment, his architectural writing became inseparable from politics: shaped by Hannah Arendt’s idea of the space of appearance, by phenomenology’s insistence on embodied experience, and by a Marxist attention to exploitation, power and the global neoliberal order.

In this first episode of a two-part interview, Kenneth Frampton, arguably the most celebrated and influential architectural thinker of the past half century, looks back over nearly six decades of his writing and teaching.

In the first half of the conversation he addresses the idea critical regionalism as “an architecture of resistance” to commodification, connects phenomenology to political agency rather than aesthetic escapism, and defends his own “operative” criticism—writing that openly aims to influence how architects practice. He is unsparing about the state of architectural education, where social-justice rhetoric often displaces serious engagement with construction and craft, and where capitalism itself remains strangely unnamed. Along the way he reflects on being, as he puts it, “a Marxist who believes in phenomenology,” on the tectonic poetics of building, and, closing out the episode, he reckons with becoming a father at 52 and a grandfather in his mid-90s—thinking about legacy, continuity and what it means for architects, in Álvaro Siza’s phrase, not to invent anything, but to transform reality.

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production, created and hosted by Matthew Blunderfield. 

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Today’s episode considers a part of the built environment that’s often overlooked in architectural discourse, yet has become one of the most vibrant sites of experimentation in recent years: the nightclub.

Since the post-COVID resurgence of nightlife, we’ve seen club spaces music festivals become laboratories again — places where architects, artists and designers, artists test how bodies move, gather, and connect. After years of enforced separation, there’s been a renewed appetite for intimacy, tactility, and collective presence. Nightclubs have stepped into that space, foregrounding not just sound and spectacle, but how architecture can invite touch, trust, and new forms of social closeness.

There are few people exploring that frontier more boldly than today’s guests: Thea Arde and Joel Jjio, the duo behind playbody. Playbody is far more than a club night — it’s an ongoing design research project that treats the dancefloor as a site of architectural inquiry. Their events incorporate sculptural objects, spatial interventions, and choreographic prompts that encourage people to rediscover their own physicality in relation to others.

In a time when digital life keeps pulling us apart, their work asks a simple but radical question: how can design rebuild social intimacy? Today we’ll talk about how playbody grew from a nightlife concept into a design studio, how they prototype through parties, and why they see the club as a critical testing ground for the future of spatial practice.

Scaffold is an Architecture Foundation production. Support our work by becoming a member on Patreon.

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This special guest episode marks the launch of the podcast OMA at 50.

Conceived and produced by architect Richard Hall, the series explores the Office for Metropolitan Architecture’s enduring influence on architectural culture, featuring conversations with an incredible roster of architects, academics, and historians.

Marking OMA’s 50th anniversary, the podcast features some of the most authoritative voices on OMA — including Laura Schrijver, Pier Paolo Tamburelli, Sébastien Marot, Giovanna Borasi, and many others.New episodes are released every Thursday. Subscribe by searching OMA at 50 on Apple Podcasts, or by following this link.

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Truwant+Rodet+ is a Basel-based architecture firm founded in 2015 by Charlotte Truwant and Dries Rodet, which operates across the fields of architecture, landscape urbanism, exhibition making, installations, furniture design, research, and teaching.

In 2017, they received the Swiss Art Award for their project A Pavilion. Since 2018, they have been developing the project, Fountain of Youth with Fabian Marti for the Campus Santé in Lausanne. In 2020, Truwant+Rodet+ won the renovation for the Centre Culturel Suisse in Paris with the Parisian firm ASBR. In 2022, they won the competition for the renovation of the Stadium of Bulle.

This conversation was recorded remotely on 12 September in Basel and London. Special thanks this week to Bárbara Maçães Costa.

The essay "Time as Material" referred to in the conversation can be accessed here.

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Scaffold is back this week, with an episode that asks a simple question: why be an architect today?

The Architecture Foundation is based inside the office of AHMM in Clerkenwell, which, back in July, hosted a summer school for teenagers just beginning to explore architecture.

We decided to speak with some of them, to try and understand what draws young people to this profession today, what they think architecture is for, and how they imagine their futures in it.

In these short conversations you get a strong impression of the perennial motivations that push people toward careers in shaping the built environment, despite the seemingly diminishing returns of practicing architecture today.

Speaking with these students about their convictions give us a lot of hope: that the culture of architecture today, its perceived importance in society, and the esteem it’s held in, might still be elevated, and remain worthy of the ambition and altruism that is clearly in no short supply in this incoming generation.

Special thanks this week to all the summer school students, and to Claire Pollock / AHMM

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Paul Shepheard is a British architect and writer known for his philosophical and multidisciplinary approach to architecture. Shepheard was a student at the Architectural Association in the 1960’s, and has worked both in practice, for the likes of James Gowan, and in academia, teaching at institutions like the AA, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Kingston School of Art.

As a writer, he is best known for books that explore architecture in relation to broader cultural, technological, and existential themes. His notable works include What is Architecture? (1994), The Cultivated Wilderness (1997), Artificial Love (2003), and How to Like Everything (2013). His most recent book, and the focus of our interview, is called Autobiography, which was published in 2024 by Canalside press. 

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Recorded live from the Kontextur Podcast Festival at Khaus in Basel, this episode features a conversation with the curator Fredi Fischli.

Fredi Fischli, along with Niels Olsen, is co-curator and co-director of exhibitions at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich. Together with Niels, Fredi works on projects at the intersection of architecture, art, research and teaching, resulting in exhibitions that subvert traditional formats of display by abandoning the top-down dissemination of knowledge typical to University Galleries, sharing instead their more raw and unbridled enthusiasm for forging strange new connections. resulting in such exhibitions as Unbeautiful museum (curated with Geraldine Tedder), Cloud’ 68. Collection of Radical Architecture, Home. A User’s Manual among many others.

Special thanks this week to Katharina Benjamin and everyone on the Kontextur team, including Angelika Hinterbrandner

Patrick Martin Rosa Thoneick and Laura Bertelt.

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A month after the opening of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale, we've invited three critics to come on the show to help make sense of what was arguably one of the most content overloaded, and curitorially ambiguous biennales in recent memory.

Since its inception in 1980, The Venice architecture biennale has set the tone for global discourse on contemporary design and urbanism, and yet the agenda of this year’s exhibition, curated by the MIT professor and recent guest of this podcast, Carlo Ratti, seemed surprisingly muted and anodyne, calling for architects to marshal the quote intelligence of the natural, artificial and collective”

Still there are more complex although perhaps unintended themes to the biennale this year, including the emerging relationship between unaccountable technologies and authoritarianism, quantatitve expansion as a proxy for genuine inclusivity, and perhaps most importantly, the exchange of an independent curatorial vision for an apparent new ideal of algorithmically determined experience. 

Furter reading:

• Emily Conklin: We Will Rest: Seeking Resistance and Recovery During Carlo Ratti’s Venice Biennale in the Brooklyn Rail
• Fabrizio Gallanti: "Fakery and deception is everywhere at Venice Architecture Biennale 2025" in Dezeen
• Phin Harper: Venice Architecture Biennale 2025 Review: A Tech Bro Fever Dream in Art Review and La Biennale Architettura: A Beginner’s Guide on The Fence.

Emily Conklin is the former managing editor of the Architect's Newspaper and is an editor and critic based in New York City. She is trained as a historic preservationist and is the founder of Tiny Cutlery studio. 

Fabrizio Gallanti is an architect, writer and curator, and directs Arc en Rêve, an architectural center in Bordeaux.

Phin Harper is a critic, curator, and sculptor and former Chief Executive of Open City.

Correction: the list of Swiss Pavilion curators mentioned in this episode mistakenly omitted Myriam Uzor, who led the project alongside Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins amd Axelle Stiefel.

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Patrick McGraw is the editor and publisher of Heavy Traffic magazine. Based in NYC, designed by Richard Turley and featuring contributions as varied as Sheila Heti, Keller Easterling and Dean Kissick, Heavy Traffic understands and reflects the mood of contemporary life in a way that fiction is increasingly well suited to. 

Literature has the ability to capture our now terminally online consciousness. Architecture, on the other hand—a cultural form that once stood for whole epochs—has in recent decades become anachronistic, divorced from the virtual world that increasingly holds us captive. 

Patrick’s trajectory is interesting because he originally studied architecture before making a shift into journalism and eventually leading a literary magazine. In our conversation we try to bridge this gap between the world of architecture and fiction.

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