Over the last few months, the team at Forensic Architecture, housed at London’s Goldsmiths University in Lewisham, has been working to piece together data and footage from the event using a mixture of video and imagery from Youtube, Periscope and other forms of social media, as well as footage from Sky News, which is a partner on the project. — Wired

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. — The Guardian

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. — Wired

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. — Public Seminar

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. — Los Angeles Review of Books

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.” — theguardian.com

"It’s an attempt to really use architecture intelligence and design intelligence to unpack violations of international law," Weizman says of Forensic Architecture. Along with SITU Research, he and his team have developed a technique called video-to-space analysis to harvest spatial data from cell phone videos and photos, analyzing footage, sometimes from multiple sources, to model and recreate chaotic events to better understand what happened on the ground. — fastcodesign.com

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. — Forensic Architecture