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.)
Forensic Architecture, by the careful modelling of the incident, successfully casts doubt on the narrative that Duggan was brandishing a gun while exiting the taxi at the time of his death by a policeman’s firearm. The analysis also casts doubt on the hypothesis that Duggan threw his gun over the fence adjacent to the pavement where his taxi stopped, ending up under a bush in the nearby public park. It puts forward an alternative hypothesis that the gun may have been planted there by the police after the shooting. Forensic Architecture also questions why a live phone video of the event from an onlooker in a high-rise block of flats across the road had an unexplained 10-second deleted blank element to it. This would have been enough time, it is speculated, for the gun to have been deliberately moved and thrown into the park by a police officer. In the actual case, the jury acquitted the policeman who fired the gun, but had this evidence been presented at the time of the trial the outcome may have been very different.
The analysis depends on the very skilful use of three-dimensional architectural modelling, to build up a highly plausible reenactment of the incident. This is done through a number of means. First, the actual existing site is recorded photographically. This type of survey technology, by using a number of cameras and satellite geo-positioning, builds up an accurate three-dimensional model of the site. Then the transposing of the live video, from the high-rise flat, onto the computer model gives a seemingly accurate real-time modelling of the movement of the car, the police officers and the suspect. What is clever is that by moving within the space of the model, the model can be used to analyse what the police officer, who shot the suspect, and indeed anyone else at the scene, may or may not have seen during the incident by showing the incident from his or her point of view.
Forensic Architecture has been very successful at using the technology of three-dimensional modelling to investigate many alleged human rights abuses all over the world. Weizman’s book, Forensic Architecture – Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, highlights some of the incidents that his team of architects have analysed. These include the modelling of the gas chambers at Auschwitz to prove the existence of the shafts through which the deadly gas was inserted (said not to exist by Holocaust deniers), to the modelling of drone attacks by the CIA in Afghanistan, to the study of war sites in Serbia. Forensic Architecture has also conducted many analytical studies of incidents during the Arab-Israeli conflict. Among other awards, they were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2018.
I wonder though, if we are so impressed by the technology of three-dimensional modelling that we tend not to question its veracity. I myself have been at hearings where perspectives of existing and proposed buildings are presented as truth when, in reality, they are often manipulations to suit the arguments of the proposers. These manipulations or untruths can take the form of distorting what exists to show, for example, that an architectural proposal harmonises contextually with its neighbours. Or it can be a simple shift of perspective that minimises the impact of a building’s height or scale. With a small amount of time spent investigating, it can often be seen that the model has been adjusted in order to shine a positive light on the proposal. While I admire the sophistication of Forensic Architecture’s modelling and I applaud their intent to uncover human rights abuses, I am aware that technology can be open to manipulation. I can see that a jury could be swayed or even blinded quite easily through the use of sophisticated graphics, computer modelling and reconstructions. It could, for example, be taken as gospel truth by a jury that the technology is telling an absolute truth because what is presented is so convincing and so realistic. The question then becomes who checks the veracity of the models presented and who checks the truth of the counter forensics? I can envisage, in the future, a sort of counter counter forensic architecture taken up by the accused.
It is also instructive to put the Forensic Architecture story into the context of current architectural training. We seem to be educating thousands of architects every year who chase a diminishing pool of building work. More often than not, building contracts are now contractor design led in which the contractor ends up designing most of the details according to a sort of vague architectural vision (and then only if the contractor is willing to buy into that vision). Increasingly, current graduates are often unable to sketch, by hand, details to scale (a skill that is most useful on site where architects are increasingly rare) but are more comfortable designing on computer. However, here is an outlet for these students who are able to build incredibly sophisticated computer models but have little interest in how something is physically built.
Perhaps the work of Forensic Architecture makes sense of the irony that real architectural projects are in fact a little boring for many architecture students. I admire what Weizman is doing because he is encouraging architects to stand up publicly and use their skills for a public purpose. His clients are not self-indulgent narcissists building monuments to themselves or property developers squeezing out every available square inch of profitable space, clients to which the world of elitist design often caters.
I am sure Weizman will have his work cut out should the current war in Ukraine end as there will, undoubtedly, when the dust settles (and I hope it does), be multiple investigations into alleged war crimes. However, I am aware that truth is not necessarily absolute and, therefore, it is important to establish the integrity of his work. For his sake and for the sake of those that he defends, it is essential that he cannot be accused of falsely manipulating graphics or other technology for the purpose of benefiting his arguments. Perhaps his questioning of what was truth and what was make believe started with that play that we all put on together in the old vegetable market in South London many years ago.
