Forensic Architecture

Forensic Architecture significantly expands the field with new concepts for understanding the technologically transformed mediascape from which evidentiary assemblages are compiled in service of assessing the common and globally connected concerns of our built environment. This expanded form situates architecture as a media form inscribed with and disseminating information produced by global politics and capital flows. It shares a broad horizon with thinkers like Keller Easterling, and challenges us to reconsider the discipline in its common usage.

The book moves through different levels of granularity, offering an overview and some brief case studies in Poland, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Serbia, Palestine, Syria and Guatemala before moving into the painstaking detail that demonstrates the scope of their interpretive labor with two in-depth case studies in Palestine. In the case of the Saydnaya Syrian detention camp, architectural renderings are co-constructed with a group of survivors in an iterative feedback loop stimulating collective memory, with testimonies as ‘memory objects’ scripted over videos in virtually-reconstructed environments. There is a psychotherapeutic element, adding more dimension to this multidisciplinary practice, with the potential to resurface memory and heal traumatized victims while amending the historical register and seeking retribution and reparations.

It’s concerning that to ‘dismantle the masters house with the masters tools’ reinforces practices of positivist, aestheticized, expert-down, detail-oriented forensic analysis easily embroiled in post-truth attention economies and byzantine financially-biased legal processes.

Forensic Architecture performs roles of cyborg witness-investigator across interstitial trans- and emerging disciplines to intervene politically in rapidly evolving mediascapes. It asks for architecture and images to be understood as emergent of technological, social, political and economic conditions and applies an expanded practice to interrogate ‘The slow violence of the split second.’

Social media mention 6/19