Interviews With Architects, Artists & Designers

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