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Forensic Architecture, whose work is going on show next month at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, 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. “We think that architects need to be public figures,” says Weizman. “They should take positions, whatever they do. We map the most extreme and violent forms.”

“We’re building a new sub-discipline of architecture,” he adds. “We just have to figure it out.” They use whatever means they can to reconstruct a hybrid of physical and virtual space – the metadata surrounding phone calls and phone-camera videos, meteorology, eyewitness accounts, reconstructions. They might scrape thousands of images of a bombing off social media and match them with material facts to fix facts in space and time, as if with the coordinates of a multidimensional map. They learn from ancient as well as modern methods, such as the memorising techniques of Roman orators and Elizabethan actors, when helping ex-prisoners reconstruct the monstrous and secret prison of Saydnaya in Syria.

They are engaged in a game of wits with military and security services. Their arena is shaped by surveillance and data collection – factors that give rise to well-founded fears that they might be abused by power. Forensic Architecture aims to make these techniques benefit rather than harm human rights. In a world saturated by images, where seemingly almost everything is exposed to view, they try to make visible those things that are kept hidden. They prefer to call their activity “counter-forensics”, “forensics” being “the art of the police”.

The material is harrowing: to see, for example, from several CCTV camera positions, the daily life of an Aleppo hospital in the seconds before it is obliterated by pro-regime forces. “You never get used to it,” says Weizman. The work is also compelling, both in the inventiveness, precision and patience of the processes and the crystalline outcomes. It might take a year to reconstruct a day, as it did with the events of Black Friday, 1 August 2014, when 2,000 Israeli bombs, missiles and shells were dropped on the city of Rafah, in the Gaza strip. But Forensic Architecture’s research into that day contributed to the cancellation of the “Hannibal Directive”, a classified policy whereby the Israeli military might kill their own soldiers if they are taken prisoner, rather than allow them to become hostages.

This is not the point where most architecture students expect to end up. 

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