Kenneth Frampton

Kenneth Frampton

From Scaffold by The Architecture Foundation

November 28, 2025 · 56 min

About this episode

Kenneth Frampton discusses his political awakening and the intersection of architecture and politics in his work.

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…

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Host: The Architecture Foundation

Guest: Kenneth Frampton

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