Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability

Forensic architecture -- the investigative practice at the heart of and introduced by this book -- refers to the production of architectural evidence and to its presentation in different forums, both political and juridical. It regards the common elements of our built environment -- fragments, buildings, cities and landscapes as well as their media representations -- as entry points from which to interrogate the present.

Forensic Architecture is also the name of a research agency Eyal Weizman established in 2010 with a group of fellow architects, artists, filmmakers, investigative journalists, scientists and lawyers. The agency undertakes independent investigations of state violence, secrecy and cover-ups in the context of armed conflict and environmental destruction. The agency also acts on commissions from human rights prosecutors for whom Forensic Architecture produces evidence files and works with international human rights, environmental justice and media groups.

The book has three parts: the first, ＂Introduction to Forensic Architecture,＂ is a ＂what is＂ and ＂how to＂ of forensic architecture. The second, ＂The Architectural Image Complex,＂ presents a few of the Agency’s most recent investigations in Palestine -- a place in which the trajectory that led to forensic architecture began. And, the third part, ＂Ground Truth,＂ seeks to connect a microanalysis of the struggle of the Bedouin community to hold onto their lands at the shifting northern threshold of the al-Naqab/Negev Desert to larger scale and longer-term environmental transformations along the desert edges worldwide.

Both forensics and architecture refer to well-established disciplinary frames. Brought together, however, they shift each other’s meaning and bring a different mode of practice into being. Architecture adds an essential and to date missing investigative method to legal and political issues. Forensics, on the other hand, turns architecture into an investigative practice, a probative mode for enquiring the present through its spatial materialization. It demands that architects focus their attention on the materiality of the built environment and its media representation. It also, significantly, challenges architects to make their claims publicly and politically in the most antagonistic of forums.