Welcome to Hard Talk from the BBC World Service with me, Michelle Hussein.

Today's guest is the Israeli-born architect Ayal Weizmann,

who began more than 20 years ago looking at architecture through an unusual lens.

He's created what he calls forensic architecture,

using skills rooted in construction and physical spaces

to recreate and model crime scenes

and to investigate decades old and present-day abuses.

From police killings to war crimes and from the Amazon to the Middle East,

is he right to see architecture as political and to call for his fellow architects to be public figures and to take positions.

A.L. Weitzman, welcome to Hard Talk. Your organisation is called Forensic Architecture.

Let's begin with you telling us what the essence of it is. What is it about?

Forensic architecture is an organisation that provides architectural evidence in international forums.

In tribunals and international courts, we present evidence in the media and also in exhibitions.

In fact, we have emerged through an understanding that so much of contemporary conflict happen in cities

and when conflict happen in cities, buildings and built environment become evidence for the crimes

that are committed by the belligerent, by the militaries in them.

So you could read the building in an analogous way to reading a dead body.

You read the wound, you read a trace, and you start to reconstruct what has happened in this place

from traces left in a built environment. It's an unusual way to look at architecture.

Yes, I studied architecture here.

In London, at the Architectural Association,

and realized that the skill set of architects,

...