Eyal Weizman

Eyal Weizman MBE FBA (born 1970) is a British Israeli architect. He is the director of the research agency Forensic Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London where he is Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures and a founding director there of the Centre for Research Architecture^[1] at the department of Visual Cultures. In 2019 he was elected Fellow of the British Academy.

Eyal Weizman was born in Haifa, Israel. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London, and completed his PhD at the London Consortium.^[2]

In 2007 he was a founding member of the architectural collective Decolonizing Architecture (DAAR)^[3] in Beit Sahour in the West Bank, Palestinian territories. Weizman has been a professor of architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and has also taught at The Bartlett (UCL) in London at the Städelschule in Frankfurt. He lectured, curated and organised conferences in many institutions worldwide. Weizman's most known theoretical work describes the acts of the Israeli army as founded upon the post-structuralist French philosophers and a reading of them. He also conducted research on behalf of B’tselem on the "planning aspects of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank".^[4] He has also published many articles on Israeli geography and architecture.^[5][6][7] In 2013 he designed a permanent folly in Gwangju, South Korea which was documented in the book The Roundabout Revolution (Sternberg, 2015). In 2010 he established the agency Forensic Architecture, which provide advanced architectural and media evidence to civil society groups, with the help of several European Research Council grants, as well as other human rights grants. Forensic Architecture undertook research for Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Doctors without Borders (MSF), the Red Cross (ICRC), and the United Nations.

In 2017, he was a guest speaker at the 17th edition of the Sonic Acts Festival: The Noise of Being (Amsterdam). Since 2019 he is a guest professor at ETH Zurich. Between 2014 and 2017 he was a Global Scholar at Princeton University.

In February 2020, Weizman was informed by email that his right to travel to the United States under a visa waiver program had been revoked. He was later informed by an official of the US Embassy in London that an algorithm had identified a security threat that was related to him.^[8]

Weizman is on the editorial board of Third Text, Humanity, Cabinet and Political Concepts and is a board member of the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) and of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court in the Hague, and sat on the board of the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem in Jerusalem.

He is currently on the advisory boards of the Human Rights Project at Bard College in New York,^[9] as a jury member for architecture in the Akademie Schloss Solitude and of other academic and cultural institutions. In 2014 Weizman was featured in "The Architecture of Violence", a film produced for the series Rebel Architecture broadcast by Al Jazeera English.^[10]

Weizman has spoken against Israel's treatment of Palestinians. Speaking about the Israeli military targeting of civilians, Weizman said he "can't see it anything other than a part of the genocidal campaign".^[11] Work done by Weizman, as part of Forensic Architecture, has countered Israel's defense in South Africa's genocide case against Israel. Summarizing the report's findings, Weizman has said:

Israel’s defence at the ICJ relied greatly on it instituting these humanitarian zones, warnings and evacuation orders. And with this, they were trying to argue that actually they are trying to save lives, rather than, as accused, engaging in genocidal acts. In fact, when we looked at the correlation between evacuation orders and where people were actually sent, we saw very often people were sent to areas that had no adequate infrastructure. Furthermore, people were being attacked by the military in these zones.^[12]

Weizman was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to architecture.^[13]

• 2006 James Stirling Memorial Lecture Prize from the LSE/London and CCA/Montreal ^[14]
• 2011 Prince Claus Architecture Prize (co-recipient with DAAR)^[15]
• 2016 Schelling Award for Architectural Theory (refused due to Schelling Nazi history)^[16]
• 2016 The Digital Dozen 2016 Award for Breakthroughs in Storytelling from Columbia University^[17]
• 2017 Finalist, Beazley Design of the Year Award (for Forensic Architecture)^[18]
• 2017 Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics (for Forensic Architecture, finalist)^[19]
• 2017 Prix Ars Electronica (for Forensic Architecture)^[20]
• 2017 The PeaBody-Facebook, Future of Media Award (For Forensic Architecture)^[21]
• 2017 European Cultural Foundation Princess Margriet Award for Culture (for Forensic Architecture)^[22]
• 2018 nominated for the Turner Prize with Forensic Architecture
• 2019 elected Fellow of the British Academy
• 2020 MBE for services to architecture
• 2021 received the London Design Innovation Medal

• 1998 (with Christian Nicolas) Random Walk, London: Architectural Association
• 2000 Yellow Rhythms, Rotterdam: 010 Publishers
• 2003 (with Rafi Segal) Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture, Verso
• 2003 (with Anselm Franke) Territories, Builders and Warrior, Rotterdam: Witte de With Press
• 2003 (with Anselm Franke) Territories, Camps, Islands and other States of Utopia, Berlin and Cologne: Kunst Werke and Walter Koenig Press
• 2004 (with Anselm Franke) Territories, The Frontiers of Utopia and other Facts on the Ground, Cologne: Walther Koenig Press
• 2007 Hollow Land: Israel's Architecture of Occupation, Verso
• 2011 The Least of All Possible Evils: Humanitarian Violence from Arendt to Gaza, Verso
• 2012 (with Thomas Keenan) Mengele's Skull: The Advent of Forensic Aesthetics, Sternberg Press/Portikus
• 2012 Forensic Architecture: Notes from Fields and Forums (dOCUMENTA 13 notebook n.062), Hatje Cantz
• 2013 (with Ines Weizman) Before and After, Moscow: Strelka Press
• 2014 (with Alessandro Petti and Sandi Hilal) Architecture After Revolution, Berlin: Sternberg Press
• 2014 (with Forensic Architecture) FORENSIS, Berlin: Sternberg Press
• 2015 The Roundabout Revolution, Berlin: Sternberg Press
• 2015 (with photography by Fazal Sheikh) The Conflict Shoreline: Colonization as Climate Change in the Negev Desert, Göttingen: Steidl and Cabinet Books. ISBN 978-3-95829-035-8
• 2017 Hollow Land: The Architecture of Israel's Occupation, Third and updated edition (with an additional chapter) London and NYC: Verso Books
• 2017 Forensic Architecture: Towards an Investigative Aesthetics (in Spanish), Barcelona and Mexico City: MACBA/MUAC (NYT/Spanish top ten non-fiction books of 2017)^[23]
• 2017 Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability, NYC: MIT/Zone Books
• 2021 (with Matthew Fuller) Investigative Aesthetics: Conflicts and Commons in the Politics of Truth, London: Verso
• 2021 The Police Shooting of Mark Duggan: Forensic Architecture Reports, New York: Cabinet books and London: ICA books

Hollow Land

• 2017 in Arabic, Cairo and Ramallah: Madarat for Research and Publishing
• 2017 in Turkish, Istanbul: Kitap
• 2017 in Hebrew, Tel Aviv: Babel Books
• 2012 in Spanish (chr. 7): A través de los muros, Madrid: Errate naturae editors
• 2011 in Greek (chr. 7), Athens: ΤΟΠOBOPOΣ
• 2009 in German (chr. 7): Durch Wände gehen, Leipzig: Konserve-Verlag
• 2009 in German: Sperrzonen: Israels architektur der besatzung, Hamburg: Edition Nautilus
• 2009 in Italian: Architettura dell'occupazione: spazio politico e controllo territoriale in Palestina e Israele, Milan: Bruno Mondadori
• 2007 in French (chr. 7): A travers les murs, Paris: La Fabrique

The Conflict's Shoreline

• 2016 in Hebrew, Kav Hamidbar, Sav Hasihsuh, Tel Aviv: Babel Books

The Least of all Possible Evils

• 2013 in Italian, Il minore dei mali possibili, Rome: Nottetempo^[24]
• 2013 in Croatian, Najmanje od svih mogućih zala, Zagreb: Multimedijalni institute^[25]
• 2009 in Italian, Il Male Minore, Rome: Nottetempo (a short version, Italian)^[26]

Mengele's Skull

• 2020 in German, Megeles Schädel, Leipzig: Merve
• 2015 in Spanish el cráneo de Mengele, Madrid and Buenos Aires: Sans Soleil Ediciones^[27]
• 2014 in Turkish, Mengele'nin Kafatası Adli Estetiğin Ortaya Çıkışı, Istanbul, Açılım Kitap^[28]
• 2013 in Hebrew, Hagulgolet Shel Mengele: Lidata shel Haestetika Haforensit, Tel Aviv: Resling Books
• 2013 in Croatian, Mengeleova lubanja: Zaceci forenzicke estetike, Zagreb: Monoskop^[29]

Forensic Architecture exhibited internationally^[30] including at the documenta 14 in Kassel.^[31] In 2017 Forensic Architecture had two major museum exhibitions at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA)^[32] and at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC).^[33] In 2018 Forensic Architecture held a solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London.^[34] Forensic Architecture's work is included in the permanent collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

• Forensic Architecture
• Centre for Research Architecture: Roundtable Archived 7 October 2011 at the Wayback Machine
• Interview with Eyal Weizman in Full Stop magazine
• Interview with Eyal Weizman in the Believer
• Interview/podcast with Eyal Weizman at Radio Web MACBA (2015)