The Rise of Forensic Architecture

摘要

In early March, an Israeli architect named Eyal Weizman and a team of sound and static engineers, smell specialists, cameramen, and other architects gathered in a basement conference room of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, just a few hundred yards from the German parliament building in Berlin. Using scaffolding, plexiglass sheeting, Ikea furniture, and blue-painted drywall, they constructed a full-scale model of an internet cafe in Kassel, a city about a four-hour drive to the southwest. Their goal: justice. More than a decade earlier, at the real cafe, the owner's son, 21-year-old Halit Yozgat, was manning the front desk when he was shot twice with a silenced pistol. The attack was the work of a trio of far-right terrorists later dubbed the National Socialist Underground (NSU). Between 1999 and 2010, the group planted bombs in Cologne, murdered 10 people of Turkish or Kurdish descent as well as a policewoman, and robbed 14 banks. At the time, authorities blamed the deaths and bombings on ethnic mafias or family quarrels, and police in several German states publicly dismissed the possibility that they were hate crimes or terrorism.