Floris van der Poel comes on the pod this week to talk about the best work he’s discovered over the past year.

Project list (in order of discussion):

1 The rounding of Cape Horn by Charlie Dalin.

2 Atelier Scheidegger Keller + Espazium, Areal Rosengarten Housing, Zurich, 2021

3 Emmanuel Héré de Corny's Palais du Gouvernement from the years 1751-1753

4 Meat cuts, comparing French and American tastes in urbanism

5 Model of an apartment building with 68 units in Tirana by Arquitectura G

6 Volante, housing in Hilversum by Monadnock Architects (2025)

7 Zwhatt housing, Regensdorf 2024. Luetjens Padmanabhan

8 770 Park Avenue, designed by Rosario Candela.

9 Logements Beaunier by Minuit Architecture

10-11 Papieri-Areal, Construction Site B Studio Eschrickenbacher

12-13 Bois-Gentil Housing, 1st Prize — Fruehauf, Henry, Viladoms

14 Door handle — LCLA

15 Ny Østergade, Copenhagen by Praksis Arkitekter

16-17 Office Complex in Hamburg, 2025 by Kawahara Krause

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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.

Become an Architecture Foundation Patreon member and be a part of a growing coalition of architects and built environment professionals supporting our vital and independent work.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.