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 at the department of Visual Cultures. In 2019 he was elected Fellow of the British Academy.

Biography

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

Architecture career

In 2007 he was a founding member of the architectural collective Decolonizing Architecture (DAAR) 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".
He has also published many articles on Israeli geography and architecture.
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2020, Weizman was informed by email that his right to travel to the United States under a visa waiver program had been revoked.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.

Political activism

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, 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''.

Awards and recognition

Weizman was appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2020 New Year Honours for services to architecture.*2006 James Stirling Memorial Lecture Prize from the LSE/London and CCA/Montreal
*2011 Prince Claus Architecture Prize (co-recipient with DAAR)
*2016 Schelling Award for Architectural Theory (refused due to Schelling Nazi history)
*2016 The Digital Dozen 2016 Award for Breakthroughs in Storytelling from Columbia University
*2017 Finalist, Beazley Design of the Year Award (for Forensic Architecture)
*2017 Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics (for Forensic Architecture, finalist)
*2017 Prix Ars Electronica (for Forensic Architecture)
*2017 The PeaBody-Facebook, Future of Media Award (For Forensic Architecture)
*2017 European Cultural Foundation Princess Margriet Award for Culture (for Forensic Architecture)
*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

Books

* 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

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