Forensic Architecture refers to the presentation of spatial analysis within contemporary legal and political forums. The project undertakes research that maps, images, and models sites of violence within the framework of international humanitarian law and human rights. Through its public activities it also situates forensic architecture within broader historical and theoretical contexts.

Forensic Architecture 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. 

Field and Forum

Forensic Architecture is organised in two distinct ways:

Field – deals with the provision of spatial analysis for organisations promoting international humanitarian law and human rights. Our multidisciplinary team of specialised researchers examine sites of violence that bear upon legal questions of human rights violations using a host of new imaging, mapping, and modelling technologies. Research methods include site visits, the use and analysis of satellite imagery, ground penetrating radar, GPS data, photography, audio, activist media, and eyewitness interviews. Our current projects — in collaboration with organizations such as Human Rights Watch, B’tselem, FAFG (Fundación de Antropología Forense de Guatemala) and Migeurope — are organised around providing spatial evidence and technical reports for international legal processes emerging in relation to events in Libya, Gaza, Guatemala, the Mediterranean Sea, former-Yugoslavia, Pakistan and more.

Image credit: Eyal Weizman

Forum – includes a series of seminars, conferences, publications, and exhibitions undertaken at the Centre for Research Architecture and in prominent institutions worldwide. Within these contexts we investigate forensic architecture theoretically, historically, politically, and aesthetically. We have published on the history of forensics and its theoretical implications in a number of books and leading journals, including a special issue of Cabinet magazine. We have collaborated with MSF (Physicians without Borders), the House of World Culture (HKW) in Berlin, Portikus Gallery in Frankfurt, DAAR in Bethlehem, and with the Human Rights Project at Bard College in New York on a number of public programmes.

Image credit: Artist Space, NY

Forensics and Architecture

Forensic architecture typically refers to the practice of building-surveyors who assess building damage and structural integrity in legal contexts, often providing expert testimony in court. However, extracted from the specialized context of property and insurance disputes, the term could designate a general strategy for architectural research and enquiry, expanding the scope of what architecture can achieve in the world today. In order to mark out the possible stakes of forensic architecture we should examine the meaning of both words that constitute the term – excavating the genealogy of the first and projecting the possibilities of the second.

As derived from its Latin source (forensis), forensics is the art of the forum; the practice and skill of presenting an argument before a professional, political or legal gathering. As the art of the forum forensics included the presentation of objects as subjects-of-debate. This aspect of forensics was structured around a shifting triangulation between a contested object or site, the social space of the forum, and the interpreter (now the expert witness) with the authority to speak on behalf of material things.

Forensic truth is thus not a product of “positivism” – the desire to overcome language through materiality and holds reality knowable without any intermediaries – but the making of facts through narrative presentation. The aesthetics of forensic architecture  employs various imaging and modelling technologies along with new techniques of visual presentation.

Architecture is rapidly becoming the pathology of our contemporary era. With the urbanization of conflict, violations of human rights and the laws of war often take place within cities. Frequently these violations are produced by the very means of architecture itself – both by its construction and destruction. Consequently architectural representations – maps, plans, satellite imagery, aerial-footage, physical and digital models – are consistently called upon as evidence in tribunals and international courts. Todays’ forums – such as international tribunals, fact-finding missions, and multilateral organisations, those that regulate the laws of war or draft environmental accords – are undertaking political and juridical processes based on ever new ways of imaging and modelling spatial problems. Space necessarily emerges as a legal construct at the intersection between multiple modes of capture, representation, and calculation. Forensic architecture is thus not only concerned with the spaces in which war crimes are committed and registered, but also with a set of political/juridical decisions that use techniques for the imaging the earth’s surface.

The on-going debate around the environment is a good example of this convergence between law and image, as this debate is structured around new ways of sampling, analysing, and imaging vast territories that extend from the deep core of the earth to the atmospheric realm. Geospatial data, high-resolution aerial photographs, maps and models of cities and territories, the “enhanced vision” of satellite imagery, 3D scans of the terrain and the depth of the subsoil, air and ground sampling – shape the way we interrogate, understand and debate the material issues of contemporary politics. As the built environment becomes informationally enriched, new sites and states of contestation also start to appear. 

This thick surface of the earth is not an isolated, distinct, stand-alone object; rather, it is a dense fabric of complex relations, associations and chains of actions between people, environments, and artifices. It always overflows any map that tries to frame it, because there are always more connections to be made.

Forums are themselves complex sets of spaces. They are not always unitary, housed in arena-like buildings. Today’s forums rather tend to become structured assemblages of entangled institutions woven by communication technologies and the media.

Forensic architecture frames a new field of spatial thought-practice that takes the contemporary forum as its main subject of enquiry. 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 is thus grounded in both field-work and forum-work; fields being the sites of investigation and analysis, and forums the network-assemblages of political spaces in which analysis is presented and contested. Each of theses sites presents a host of architectural and political problems. 

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Exhibition/FORENSIS

15 March / 5 May 2014 — 12:00 am

Haus der Kulturen der Welt
John-Foster-Dulles-Allee, 10
Berlin
10557
Germany

The FORENSIS exhibition presents the work of the Forensic Architecture project at Goldsmiths, University of London. It includes the presentation of of forensic investigations — involving imaging processes, satellite images, 3D visualizations, models and videos — were mobilised as evidence on behalf of prosecution teams, civil society organizations, activists, human rights groups, and the United Nations. These contemporary forensic practices are situated within broader political, historical, and aesthetic contexts.
FORENSIS raises fundamental questions about the conditions under which spatial and material evidence is recorded and presented, and tests the potential of new types of evidence to expand our juridical imagination, open up forums for political dispute and practice, and articulate new claims for justice.

Curated by Anselm Franke and Eyal Weizman.

For detailed information about Forensic Architecture,please visit website

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