Forensic Architecture (FA) is a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London. Our mandate is to develop, employ, and disseminate new techniques, methods, and concepts for investigating state and corporate violence. Our team includes architects, software developers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, scientists, and lawyers.

We are an interdisciplinary agency operating across human rights, journalism, architecture, art and aesthetics, academia and the law. In 2022, the Peabody Awards programme wrote that we had co-created ‘an entire new academic field and emergent media practice’; in 2024, the European Research Council assessed Forensic Architecture as ‘a scientific breakthrough (defined as a revolutionary work that led to deep change in existing paradigms or new methods opening a new stream of research)’.

Since 2020, FA has supported the growth of agencies worldwide that practice and apply our methods. The Investigative Commons is both a global network of practitioners, and a physical space in Berlin, within the offices of our sister agency Forensis.

‘Forensic architecture’ is the name of an interdisciplinary academic field developed and developing from within Goldsmiths’ Centre for Research Architecture (CRA) since 2010. The term refers to the production and presentation of spatial evidence within legal, political, and cultural contexts, and takes architecture to include not only buildings, but shaped environments at the scale of cities and territories. In addition to the CRA’s MA in Forensic Architecture, we have set up and supported academic courses to further develop the field of forensic architecture at universities worldwide.

Our investigations employ cutting-edge techniques in spatial analysis and digital modelling to reconstruct incidents of state violence and human rights violations.

FA was born in the ‘open source revolution’; our core practice involves geolocating videos and images within navigable 3D digital models, alongside open source research and a range of established and experimental methodologies, drawing from software development, interactive cartographies, ‘remote sensing’ and satellite image analysis, fluid dynamics simulation, and ‘situated testimony’.

We investigate states and corporate entities—including militaries, police forces, government agencies, and companies—for their violent acts, including repressive policing, civilian deaths in conflict, structurally racist policy-making, violence against migrants and refugees, and historical and contemporary colonial violence, including the destruction of traditional environments and life worlds.

We take on research projects at the invitation of individuals and communities directly affected by human rights violations. We look for projects in which our unique methodologies could be decisive in support of the pursuit of accountability or political transformation, and which at the same time will help us to evolve or advance those methodologies.

Our core funding comes from academic, human rights, and technology grants. Our core funders are here, though we also often receive support for specific projects. All income we receive from the display of our work in the media and in exhibition contexts is reinvested into our research.

In the pursuit of accountability, we seek to work across forums, from courts and parliamentary inquiries, citizen’s tribunals, international media and exhibitions. Each of these forums has its own potential benefits, and limitations. That’s why we endeavour not only to present our investigations across multiple forums, but to transform these forums in the process. In courts, we struggle for the admissibility of citizen-produced digital evidence; in cultural institutions, we employ art as an investigative and political medium.

Our work has been admitted in legal processes in jurisdictions around the world, including in the US, the UK, Germany, Greece, Israel, Guatemala, and Colombia. Other investigations have been submitted to the International Criminal Court and presented in European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and the UN’s General Assembly. As a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court, our director has helped to shape the early use of new media evidence in legal contexts.

Design and development by Alan Woo.