Can architectural analysis hold power to account?

Eyal Weizman The founding director of Forensic Architecture on scrutinising spaces and landscapes to throw light on state lies, deception and miscarriages of justice

- Will Jennings

Architects sometimes achieve recognition without having completed their first building. Most, however, do want to build something, speculatively entering competitions, wooing clients and proposing projects until their big break comes. Eyal Weizman doesn’t have ambitions to design an opera house, gallery or corporate HQ. Instead, as the founder and director of Forensic Architecture, he focuses on reverse architecture, deeply studying sites, events and conditions through architectural processes; not in order to imagine a built future, but to interrogate nuances of the past – ‘our work is like an act of archaeology’.

More agency than office, Forensic Architecture applies architectural processes alongside methods of reading and rendering time, place and witness to understand sites of trauma, crime and disaster. It’s a sensitive deployment of creative skills and, while it may seem alien to more traditional architectural work, Weizman embeds his overtly political practice within the architectural sector, albeit at the centre of a Venn diagram intersecting countless other disciplines.

Forensic Architecture is based at Goldsmiths College in London, within the Centre for Research Architecture founded by Weizman in 2005. In recent years, the studio has received increasing recognition for its output. Weizman was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2019, received an MBE in 2020, and the Design Innovation Medal in 2021. Forensic Architecture was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2018, and this year received a Peabody Award for ‘co-creating an entire new academic field and emergent media practice’.