Originally published March 2022.
There are some schools of architecture which are so ‘avant garde’ that actually proposing an architectural solution to an architectural brief is deemed to be far too conservative and more than a little dull. The AA in the 80s and 90s was one of these schools and Eyal Weizman, founder of Forensic Architecture, was not an atypical student there. He thrived on the creative chaos of the school and never really proposed what would be deemed by most people to be an architectural project. I, personally, do not remember him presenting many drawings. One year he managed to coral us into teaming up with some Goldsmith drama students to put on a play in the old Borough vegetable market in Southwark, London. The play, Street of Crocodiles. by Bruno Schultz, where the actors came from Goldsmiths and the sets were designed by students from the AA, highlighted the naturally theatrical elements of the city while successfully blurring the distinction between the stage set and real life. The natural magic of the vegetable market elided almost seamlessly with this curious and bewitching play.
It seems that Weizman, a British-Israeli architect, has continued the search for non-architectural architecture post-graduation and has hit upon the clever idea of using computer modelling to reenact scenes where there may have been human rights abuses. This allows a jury, for example, a greater understanding of what might have transpired during an alleged incident. His tactics include reconstructing physical space and creating virtual space from eye witness accounts, mobile phone videos, images on social media and other sources, even sound. He then attempts to make visible those things that corporations, the police, the military or states might prefer to make invisible. He calls his art ‘counter forensics’ as opposed to ‘forensics’, which to him is an activity carried out by the police only. In such ways he attempts to make the techniques of forensic science benefit rather than harm human rights.
Forensic Architecture was showing last summer at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London as part of an exhibition titled ‘War Inna Babylon’, which examines the history of black communities’ resistance to institutional racism and UK policing. Forensic Architecture investigated the fatal shooting of Mark Duggan on Tottenham High Road on 4 August, 2011. This was the incident that is alleged to have sparked the riots, three days later, that occurred in both London and many inner urban areas of the UK during the summer of 2011. (Of course, many economists have countered that economic hardship, as a result of the 2009 financial crisis, may have been a greater factor in the cause of these riots.)
