Forensic architecture aims to uncover evidence of possible war crimes
Eyal Weizman is the chief proponent of 'forensic architecture', which analyses the impact of urban warfare for clues about possible crimes
An instalment of the documentary series opens with architect Eyal Weizman approaching one of the watchtowers along the separation wall that runs through the West Bank. An Israeli soldier shouts down, audible but invisible in the turret room: ''Don't come any closer!''
Weizman shouts back: "Why? Is this place only yours? It's everybody's place. Is that tube your home? It's not even your home, and you're sitting in that tube telling me what to do.''
Weizman has a reputation for being fearless. Fresh out of architecture school in London, the Haifa-born architect was commissioned along with colleague Rafi Seagal to showcase the best of Israeli architecture at the International Union of Architects Congress in Berlin in 2002. He presented settlements. The Israel Association of United Architects withdrew their support, cancelled the exhibition and destroyed the catalogues. The move won him worldwide attention.
Weizman has also since made a name for himself as the chief proponent of "forensic architecture", by which he analyses the impacts of urban warfare for clues about the crimes that were perpetrated there. To Weizman, buildings are weapons. When he looks out across the landscape of the occupied Palestinian West Bank, as he does in the film , aired on Al Jazeera last week, he sees a battlefield. "The weapons and ammunitions are very simple elements: they are trees, they are terraces, they are houses. They are barriers," he said.
Weizman says the most obvious and contentious aspect of what he calls the "architecture of occupation" is the system of Israeli settlements. Perched on West Bank hilltops, they are strategically positioned, according to Weizman, "to dominate" the Palestinian valleys and towns below.
Each of the uniformly suburban-looking houses - all with red roofs so that the Israeli army knows not to target them - is "itself like an optical instrument", he said. "When it is laid in rings around the hilltops, it is like a suburban-scale optical device that can survey the entire territory around it." Around them, "settler only" roads operate as borders, connecting settlements but separating Palestinian farms, towns and cities from each other.
The second intifada, as well as fighting in Iraqi and Afghan cities in the early 2000s, showed him how war was migrating to the city. Weizman - who used to work with the Palestinian planning ministry - now has his practice on "the other side of the wall", in Beit Sahour, the West Bank town just outside of Bethlehem. From there, and when he is not in London, he co-runs the Decolonising Architecture Art Residency (Daar) with Palestinian architect Sandi Hilal and Italian architect Alessandro Petti.
It was during the intifada that Weizman saw Israel quite deliberately and destructively reorganise cities to take away the upper hand from their defenders. The West Bank cities of Nablus and Jenin, for example, were laboratories for the development of urban warfare. When Israel tried to capture the heart of Jenin, "Palestine's ground zero", rather than exposing itself on the existing roads the army used bulldozers to carve out new avenues, flattening homes in the process.
When Jenin was rebuilt by its residents, they built a road wide enough for tanks. They didn't want their homes destroyed again. But they lost their protection: the city's density.
Another technique is to drive armed carriers into buildings, often homes, creating holes in the walls through which to deploy soldiers. The soldiers "immediately get saturated inside the buildings themselves - moving, because it's so dense, between the one house and the other. Like worms moving inside apples.''
In this manner, architects can become "archaeologists of the present", piecing together how things unfolded - which building was destroyed by artillery, which by tank fire, which by bulldozers. Weizman now leads the Forensic Architecture team at Goldsmiths, University of London - a unique project that provides "architectural evidence'' for international prosecution teams, political organisations, NGOs and the UN.
Their investigations include drone strikes, violence by state security forces on the Ixil Maya people in Guatemala and the use of white phosphorous in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead. They've also looked at Israel's tactic of "knock on roof" warnings, used extensively in the most recent conflict in Gaza.
"Cities are always about the links between buildings in the street, networks, infrastructure. When war happens in the city, people die in buildings, the majority in their own homes," Weizman said. By carefully examining those buildings, you can find architectural evidence. If the Gaza conflict made it to the International Criminal Court, Weizman supposes he'd work with the prosecution: "We would show where there's a violation of international law in the way in which buildings are attacked."
Weizman believes this sort of architectural intelligence will be increasingly called on. He's not alone: the Israel Defence Forces and the US and British militaries are establishing architectural academies for soldiers.
"As pathologists need to have medical intelligence to understand what happens to a body that was destroyed", we also need to have "architectural intelligence to understand that violence", Weizman said.
While much of his work focuses on the dystopias created by architecture, Weizman also imagines architectural solutions for a "shared future". He imagines how settlements might be turned into Palestinian public institutions, and military bases into nature parks for migratory birds.
Rocking in a chair in his London home, he tries to sum up his feelings about the situation. "It's a political commitment to all people - I won't even say 'both', like there's only Israelis and Palestinians," he said. "They are incredibly complex and multilayered societies, and I have so much love for this land and for the people that live there."
