We live in frames — societal frames, cultural frames, politico-economic frames, ideological frames, and physical, therefore, architectural frames. Evidently, frames manifest as abstract concepts as easily as they assume material forms. With the endless ways in which it can manifest come also a multiplicity of agencies, ways in which the frame influences, instigates, or enables actions, and most importantly, ways in which frames can perform. It is here that the frame should not only be considered as an object (e.g. an architectural one) or a condition (e.g. a political one), but also as the subject of a specific action, of framing. In this, architecture is not merely the autonomous production of architectural objects, it is intrinsically interwoven with the frames that at once define it (the discipline) and us (people). Fundamental to this is the assumption that an architectural object, whether in its most widely recognised form as a building, performs by framing life. The way in which this performance is enacted, the way in which life is being framed, is thus informed, defined, or mediated by the frames around us, be it socio-cultural or politico-economic frames. And precisely because architecture is compliantly responsible for the construction and strengthening of certain frames, whether intentional or unintentional, it is also capable in providing a better understanding of these underlying multiplicities of frames. Architecture is the very frame through which the thesis explores the frame. In addition to discussing the frame in relation to architecture by exploring its performative aspects, the thesis attempts to critically assess its inherent issues: its affective potential on the extents of human behaviour; the creation of a duality between an inside and an outside of the frame (dichotomisation); the reflection of a (Western) culture of binary thinking; its connotations with well-defined limits, closed boundaries, hard borders, and therefore restrictiveness, exclusiveness, and prescriptiveness. The thesis will take the position in favour of an open approach to architecture, in which instabilities and ambiguities are allowed and encouraged, not for the sake of aesthetic consideration, but for its contingent productive outcome — new interpretations, understandings, and activities. Frankly, the goal of the thesis is not to create ‘methodologies’, ‘toolboxes’, or other inherent prescriptive means for architectural and urban design. In fact, the research, and the subsequent project in its entirety, ‘frames’ an introspective, sceptical position towards the wide range of predefined notions in architecture. In our time of increased societal polarisation and a persisting culture of antagonisation, architecture’s role should be to rethink its own binary thinking, to unframe some of its own established frames, to allow instabilities and ambiguities to emerge, to productively open up for contingencies, and to blur its perimeters, boundaries, and limiting frames — architecture liberated from its problematic fixed preconceptions, norms, and dogmas.