I’m late coming to this – partly because I’m just back from Finland, and partly because term is upon us….

Here is an excellent short documentary from Al Jazeera featuring Eyal Weizman on ‘The architecture of violence‘, explaining the ‘slow violence’ of architecture in the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the evolution of urban warfare.

It also documents the trajectory of Eyal’s work, from the brilliant Hollow Land through to forensic architecture (as he says ‘the crime was done on the drawing-board itself’).

It’s the third episode in Al Jazeera‘s Rebel Architecture series.  Film-maker Ana de Sousa explains:

Until recently I would look at images of these ruins and see nothing more than potent monuments of destruction. Traces of lives eliminated or chased away. But they are more than that. Making The Architecture of Violence with the architect Eyal Weizman has shifted my gaze, taught me to look at buildings and ruins as objects that bear witness to events and that can speak to us – we just need to know what questions to ask them.

From the moment we started developing this series, the idea behind Rebel Architecture was to look beyond so-called starchitecture – beyond the architectural ostentation of technological feats, and towards a more socially aware, though still creative architecture serving the people on the ground. But it was also to use architecture as a way of exploring different environmental, social and political realities around the world. While many of the documentaries in our series have looked at how architecture – the design and construction of physical structures – is being used by architects to respond to rapid urbanisation, pollution, limited resources or natural disasters, The Architecture of Violence is a different kind of film.

When I came across the work of Eyal Weizman, I realised that there was a completely different way of using architecture and of being an architect. Weizman’s work lies at the intersection of architecture with politics, violence, conflict and human rights. As an Israeli architect opposed to the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, he fell foul of the Israeli architectural establishment early in his career, and was forced to explore alternatives to “building buildings”. Our film looks at how architecture can be used to interpret, protest and resist, in Weizman’s case, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

I’ve embedded the video from YouTube below, but if you have difficulty accessing it clink on the link above, which will take you directly to the original on Al Jazeera.