Forensic architecture aims to uncover evidence of possible war crimes

An instalment of the documentary series Rebel Architecture 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 The Architecture of Violence, 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.