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Architecture can be 'an exercise of violence' warns Forensic Architecture founder

2022-10-25T13:38:00-04:00

Forensic Architecture founder Eyal Weizman has used a speech at the Culture Summit Abu Dhabi to set out the group’s position on the relationship between architecture and human rights. Weizman, who is also a professor at Goldsmiths, University of London, offered the summit a series of examples of how the Peabody Award-winning, Turner Prize-nominated organization has used spatial principles to expose human rights abuses.

“Forensic architecture is a way of reading architectural facts, architectural material, architectural situations, in order to see within them evidence for these violations that I'm speaking about,” Weizman said, as reported by The National News. “Perhaps the best way to understand it is, just like a pathologist reads a dead body — looking at the bones — forensic architecture looks for evidence of these crimes in walls, in foundations, in buildings, in plans, in bridges, in roads etc in a way that they're conceived sometimes, in order to survey and control us.”

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Forensic Architecture has been named a 2022 Peabody Award winner

2022-03-30T18:30:00-04:00

The activist community can rejoice today on the news that groundbreaking London-based collective Forensic Architecture (FA) has been given an Institutional Peabody Award for its continued public service and contributions to electronic media.

The group was cited for their work documenting the use of Israeli spyware called Pegasus, the ongoing exhibition Cloud Studies, and myriad investigations into police brutality, war crimes, surveillance culture, environmental racism, and the illegal occupation of Palestine.

FA’s use of various forms of data, 3D visualization technology, photogrammetry, lidar, and citizen videos was likewise commended for its innovation and incorporation into what the awards jury deemed “sophisticated architectural techniques.”

The twelve-year-old group founded by Israeli academic Eyal Weizman is coming off of another banner year in which its pursu...

The University of Manchester has forced out Whitworth Gallery director Alistair Hudson over his pro-Palestine Forensic Architecture show

2022-02-24T17:39:00-05:00

A legal smear campaign has ousted a museum director over the inclusion of a pro-Palestinian statement in an exhibition examining the work of Forensic Architecture at the University of Manchester.

Artnet News is reporting the forced resignation of Alistair Hudson following a concerted lobbying effort on the part of several prominent local barristers who form the group U.K. Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI).

Hudson has been the director of the university’s Whitworth Art Gallery since 2017 and became the target of the pro-Israel group’s effort after allowing the statement as part of a show called Cloud Studies that focused in part on the activist group’s study of poor air quality and human rights in areas that included the occupied territories as well as Louisiana and Beirut.

In a statement, Forensic Architecture’s founder Eyal Weizman said the saga “makes clear yet again that the anti-colonial struggle in support of Palestine and elsewhere has to be fought within and sometimes against our ...

Forensic Architecture reinstates exhibition at University of Manchester following censorship row

2021-08-19T20:55:00-04:00

A statement in support of Palestinian rights put up by Forensic Architecture as part of an exhibition at the University of Manchester’s Whitworth Gallery is back in its rightful place tonight after backlash against the message caused the group to temporarily withdraw the exhibition over censorship concerns.

The group shared a social media post on Wednesday showcasing the re-installation of their statement that decried the “ethnic cleansing” of the country as a prominent introduction to their exhibition titled Cloud Studies which opened on July 2nd. The exhibition outlines FA's initial phase of the latest investigation which explores and exposes how “power reshapes the very air we breathe," according to a brief posted on the group's website.

Our statement is back up! pic.twitter.com/uwE5pJM7Am
— Forensic Architecture (@ForensicArchi) August 18, 2021

Read Forensic Architecture's statement standing with Palestine here.

The move came after the announcement earlier in the week that the g...

Algorithm denies Forensic Architecture's Eyal Weizman entry into United States

2020-02-20T11:55:00-05:00

Last week Mr. Weizman confronted an unexpected mystery when he was denied a visa to enter the United States. An official at the U.S. Embassy in London told him, without elaboration, he said, that an algorithm had identified a security threat that was related to him.

According to a report by Colin Moynihan in The New York Times, Eyal Weizman, the director of research-focused investigative practice Forensic Architecture, was stopped on his way to attend the opening of the group's first American retrospective exhibition.

The exhibition, Forensic Architecture: True to Scale, is being displayed at Miami’s Museum of Art and Design.

Architecture as forensic evidence in global crimes against humanity

2018-02-26T15:22:00-05:00

Forensic Architecture [...] is an agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London. The organisation’s founder and director is Eyal Weizman, a British-Israeli architect. Its primary mission is research, to “develop evidentiary systems in relation to specific cases”; in so doing, it acts as “an architectural detective agency”, working with NGOs and human rights lawyers to uncover facts that confound the stories told by police, military, states and corporations.

Weizman conceives of his work as an alternative practice, aiming to create a sub-discipline of architecture using architectural evidence in cases of war crimes or other human rights violations. Calling their activity "counter-forensics", the organization does not take commissions from governments or corporations and does not take political sides leaving them with many enemies.

“We think that architects need to be public figures [...] They should take positions, whatever they do. We map the most extreme and violent forms" explains Weizman.

Reconstruction by Forensic Architecture of the bombing of Rafah, Gaza, 1 August 2014. Image: Forensic Architecture.

Originally focused in Israel and Palestine, Forensic Architecture has taken their practice global to wherever their services are needed such as Kassel, Syria, the disappearance of a student in Mexico, a lethal factory fire in Karachi, and a detention center in Cameroon.

We live in a world where almost everything is exposed to view a...

Eyal Weizman uses architectural evidence to investigate bombings in Syria

2017-08-09T15:22:00-04:00

Eyal Weizman is a London-based Israeli architect and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. His work focuses on architecture as a form of political intervention and the discipline's role in modern urban warfare. For the past couple of years, Weizman's research project—Forensic Architecture—has been using architectural evidence for the investigation of crimes against the state on cases ranging from drone strikes to genocide. Repositioning the field of architecture within forensics, Weizman and his team look at evidence such as debris left behind, physical ruin, floor plans, cell phone footage etc. in order to reconstruct the events that took place, much like one would analyze a crime scene.

In a recent interview with Vice, Weizman talks about his work, recreating bombings in Syria, and using architecture to investigate the invisible. Check out the video below!

The architecture of data forensics

2016-02-07T21:43:00-05:00

FA investigators take standard architectural and digital tools such as telemetry, video-footage syncing and shadow clocks, and repurpose them to reveal the secrets of conflict zones. Weizman's team has also pioneered plume analysis...Weizman and his colleagues' brief is as wide-ranging as man's cruelty to man: they mine the information seam where enemies clash, where migrants drown, natives are dispossessed and civilians bombed.

For the January 2016 issue of WIRED magazine, Michael Hodges profiled the work of Forensic Architecture (FA) and the organisation's director Eyal Weizman.

Architecture and the index: McKenzie Wark on Eyal Weizman and Forensic Architecture

2015-11-09T16:38:00-05:00

Besides the thing itself, architecture concerns itself with two kinds of sign about it: iconic signs and symbols. Iconic signs resemble the thing itself. They are the plans and elevations and isometrics. The more symbolic architecture is that of language, the word, the logo and so forth. The postmodern turn shifted the emphasis from the iconic to the symbolic. I think [Eyal] Weizman has created an architecture about a whole other kind of sign – the index.

"Indexical signs are traces of events: where there is smoke there is fire. The smoke does not resemble the fire. It is not an icon. Nor does it have a code like a symbolic sign system. Forensics is a matter of working backwards from the index to the event of which it is the sign, like in a detective story. A forensic architecture takes as its subject events that happen or don’t happen in build space, including the destruction of built space."

Along the political equator of the desert threshold

2015-11-03T00:24:00-05:00

Weizman’s new book, 'The Conflict Shoreline' (Steidl in association with Cabinet Books, 2015), a richly illustrated volume produced in collaboration with American photographer Fazal Sheikh about the displacement of the Bedouins in the Negev/Naqab desert.

George Prochnik and Eyal Weizman discuss the latest work by the Forensic Architecture team, Bedouin displacement in the Negev and "threshold of detectability."

Eyal Weizman on understanding politics through architecture, settlements and refuseniks

2014-12-02T16:56:00-05:00

They would never discuss issues of repression or land grab directly. There is a certain pact of silence around the political dimension of architecture there. Schools of architecture depoliticise the profession, they put it very much within the domain of aesthetic experimentation

Eyal Weizman - architect, writer, activist and professor of visual cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London - is explaining how architecture and power are inextricably linked, even within structures that appear largely to serve an aesthetic purpose. Buildings or cityscapes that a tourist crosses the world to see were often conceived with the intent to oversee their populations.

Weizman has just returned from a trip to the US. Like Israel, highways in Los Angeles serve more affluent communities and bypass the poorer areas. In the Gulf, he says, the labour force is contained, separated and supervised. Such capitalist tools of separation, seen across the world, "are all part of the growing toolbox of architecture and planning in the West Bank – it's composed, I mean it has a sort of colonial history, but it's contemporary vocabulary exists overall, everywhere you look, everywhere you go you have the politics of surveillance, separation, supervision and sometimes even oppression. Pal...

What can ‘forensic architecture’ reveal about the conflict in Gaza?

2014-09-02T13:25:00-04:00

Weizman has also made a name for himself as the chief proponent of “forensic architecture”, by which he analyses the impacts of urban warfare for clues about the crimes that were perpetrated there. To Weizman, buildings are weapons. When he looks out across the landscape of the occupied Palestinian West Bank [...] he sees a battlefield. “The weapons and ammunitions are very simple elements: they are trees, they are terraces, they are houses. They are barriers.”

Gaza attacks: Lethal warnings

2014-07-14T22:13:00-04:00

Israeli military lawyers argue that if residents are warned, and do not evacuate, then they can be considered legitimate collateral damage. Under this interpretation of the law, the civilian victims become human shields. This is a gross misuse of international law.

Israeli architect Eyal Weizman who teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he runs the Forensic Architecture project pens an account of misinformation IDF uses on so called "warnings" and fabricating the "human shield" factor further criminalizing Hamas. The article illustrates how the IDF lawyers legitimizing Israeli Army's ruthless destruction of civilians indiscriminately and coins the term "lawfare".

In this research based article the misinformation and terminologies circulating the western media are debunked.

Mr. Weizman and his team of researchers reconstruct a 3d model of destroyed Salha family home in Gaza based on the interviews of the surviving members of the family and other evidence.

"Our work was an attempt to reconstruct what happened between the warning shot and the lethal shot. The architectural model provided an aid for the recollection of events obscured by time and trauma. It was evidence intended to counter the Israeli Army's version of the event and the...

Editor's Picks #350

2014-01-14T13:15:00-05:00

The latest edition of ShowCase highlights CRAB Studio’s Abedian School of Architecture in Queensland, Australia.

Plus, the fourth installment in Screen/Print (Archinect’s experimentation in translation across media) features "fruity labors" from the quarterly journal MAS Context's 20th issue, Narrative.

News
Architect Magazine reported the American Folk Art Museum will be razed for a Diller Scofidio + Renfro's designed MoMA expansion.

Amelia Taylor-Hochberg Editorial Manager for Archinect, went to the trouble of gathering "a slew of responses to the proposal, both indignant and accepting, from Archinect contributors and beyond".

HotelSphinx thought the excuses/reasons given for demolition were ironic "DS+R is a firm that made a building out of fog for the Expo in Yverdon-les-Bains in 2002. Yes, fog. But aligning floor plates is too difficult? They have got to be joking me".

Meanwhile, Mason White of Lateral Office was perplexed.

"Architects revolt about 2 high-society architecture firms in...

Eyal Weizman on legacy of Ariel 'the bulldozer' Sharon

2014-01-12T22:53:00-05:00

"Sharon's architecture involved not only destruction but also construction. The other major projects he undertook, besides the destruction of the camps, was an attempt to "pacify" the refugees by constructing and forcefully relocating a few thousand of them into Israeli-style social housing blocks next to major Palestinian cities".

With the recent news of Ariel Sharon's passing, Eyal Weizman (architect, professor and director of the Forensic Architecture) reviews the legacy of construction and destruction he left behind. As "Daddy of the Settlement movement" his legacy has decisively shaped the built environment of today's Israel and Palestine. For more on his political legacy you can also read Jonathan Cook here.

h/t @Brendan Cormier

The quasi-archaeological methodologies of forensic architecture

2012-11-27T11:27:00-05:00

The “architecture” in forensic architecture would thus designate, not the product of building design, but rather an expanded field of spatial investigation, imaging and representation, while the word “forensic” should be understood as the very condition that enables architectural research to perform politically, that is, to enter a complex political or juridical calculus.

Eyal Weizman is the Principal Investigator for Forensic Architecture, which is a European Research Council funded project (2011-2014) hosted by the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University of London within the Department of Visual Cultures.