I’m in Forensic Architecture’s offices at Goldsmiths University, south of the Thames—one of the last areas of London that has not been gentrified. In front of me, I see a huge open-space studio with about 20 colleagues. There's paper everywhere, there are models, there are maps and photographs pinned to the walls, there are people speaking on phones, trying to verify information. It looks like a hybrid between an architecture studio and a newsroom.

I founded the Centre for Research Architecture in 2005 as an alternative to conventional architectural education, and in 2010 I established Forensic Architecture. We investigate state and corporate violence in the UK and around the world through a multidisciplinary practice that blends the arts, architecture and investigative journalism.

We practice the art of attention, a form of aesthetic expertise. When I talk about aesthetics, I refer to the original Greek meaning of the word: what is in the realm of the senses. We are attentive to visuals, to images, to spaces, to faint traces that others cannot see. We believe architecture is not merely a way of designing and constructing buildings but a field of knowledge, a way of looking at the world. 

I moved to London after a period of activism in occupied Palestine, having experienced, as an Israeli-born person, how architecture can be used as a weapon. When you start understanding that banal features of the landscape, like roads, hilltop settlements, bridges, fields and orchards, are part of a process of colonization, you understand that you are actually looking at a battlefield. Whoever gets to draw the space controls the space.