In common with most of the country, the staff at Forensic Architecture in south London made their way to work on the morning of 14 June 2017 while trying to process the dreadful news of a major fire at Grenfell Tower in Kensington. Unlike the rest of us, they did not push the reports to the back of their minds in order to get on with their day. They gathered around their desks on the third floor of the Richard Hoggart Building at Goldsmiths, University of London, and thrashed out ideas about how they could help.
Forensic Architecture was founded in 2010 by architect Eyal Weizman. The organisation has been described as an architectural detective agency. “We think that architects need to be public figures,” Weizman told the Guardian in an interview earlier this year. “They should take positions, whatever they do. We map the most extreme and violent forms.”
His team has previously investigated the killing of an unarmed Palestinian at a Nakba Day protest outside Ofer Prison in Beitunia, next to Ramallah; the murder of a Turkish-German student, Halit Yozgat, in an internet cafe in Kassel; and the kidnapping of 43 students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Guerrero, Mexico. The evidence from these and other investigations has been presented in exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, and the White Box, at Zeppelin University, in Friedrichshafen, Germany, among other galleries – which has led, somewhat bizarrely, to the organisation receiving a nomination for the Turner Prize. Weizman has tweeted that, while he welcomed this promotion of the organisation, he would resist an “impoverished and unimaginative” view of its work.
As the scale of the horror at Grenfell Tower unfolded last summer, Nicholas Masterton, an architect and researcher at Forensic Architecture, was tasked with collecting a welter of metadata, photographs, and smartphone video footage.
When he began to receive smartphone footage, Masterton set up a spreadsheet to analyse the material. He added a description of each clip, citing the source (Sky News, for example) and the date it was received. He recorded the start and end time according to the metadata; the accuracy of the metadata (“Often it is inaccurate”); the geographical location of where the footage was captured; the facades covered by the clip; and the duration, resolution and frame rate of the clip. He used a computer programme and digital animation software to model the tower as the fire raged.
Last month, I sat next to Masterton at his workstation as he took me through what he had gathered so far. The awful speed with which the fire took hold will never lose its visceral shock.
Also watching Masterton at work was Bob Trafford, who joined Forensic Architecture in 2017 after three years as a freelance investigative journalist. When I spoke with him by phone, some weeks later, he said that the number of clips of video footage submitted from smartphones has been modest – “in the dozens” – but that, in large part, the project will not be about video. The Forensic Architecture team will also trawl through the thousands of pages of documents released by the public enquiry.
The enquiry began on 21 May with testimony from friends and relatives of the 72 people killed in the fire. Firefighters and commanders are expected to give evidence for around six weeks, starting on 21 June. In September, the bereaved, survivors, and local residents will present their accounts. The terms of reference on the enquiry’s website lists 13 issues to be examined.
Bob Trafford says, “We’ll be data mining all the information from the enquiry to create a visual representation in three-dimensional space.”
This is a key point for Shah Aghlani who lost his mother and aunt in the fire. He told me he has met with Forensic Architecture to discuss the project and hopes it will help people understand the enormity of the fire.
“A picture is worth a thousand words. Translating the information into a visual document will help people who don’t have the capability or resources to trawl through the evidence to see what happened. The country needs to know this. It’s about finding the failures of the services and addressing them.”
He was adamant that neither the public enquiry nor Forensic Architecture should pull their punches.
“There should be no red lines. We should not try to make people into heroes. There are no heroes. All the people who died were failed.”
