Situated Testimony: Forensic Architecture’s Memory Objects

“Forensic Architecture” describes both the research agency, founded in 2011, as well as its investigative method and aesthetic practice. As an emerging discipline, forensic architecture exploits the relation between space, material, and memory. My aim in this article is to consider how the agency’s “memory objects”—aestheticized virtual renderings of their investigations—operate as testimonial objects, evidentiary archives, and simulated sites of conscience. I attend to one “memory object” in particular, a film titled “Drone Strike Investigation Case no. 2: Mir Ali, North Waziristan, 4 October 2010; The Architecture of Memory,” an investigation which the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Counter Terrorism and Human Rights commissioned Forensic Architecture to undertake. This article suggests that this virtual “memory object” troubles the status of both the human witness and the physical landscape to which it refers.

The Interstice: the terminal and the 21st century pandemic

We build to create desirable places, -healthy places. Architecture insulates the healthy, desirable environment of the inside from the unhealthy world of the outside. Disease has therefore served as the historical rationale to exclude, situating the unhealthy person outside and the healthy person inside. Supplanting the local epidemic of the past, the 21st century global pandemic renders all universally vulnerable. Responding to this contemporary threat, this project explores the scenario where an infectious disease carrier arrives by plane to Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., and a possible architectural response. The subsequent project proposes an “Interstice”, an in-transit, infectious disease treatment and containment facility to be located within the airport’s grounds. Purposely built for the accommodation of contagious passengers, the Interstice derives space, material, and form, from the passage of people between the outside (the realm of the unhealthy) to the inside (a place of relative health).

The Interstice: the terminal and the 21st century pandemic

We build to create desirable places, -healthy places. Architecture insulates the healthy, desirable environment of the inside from the unhealthy world of the outside. Disease has therefore served as the historical rationale to exclude, situating the unhealthy person outside and the healthy person inside. Supplanting the local epidemic of the past, the 21st century global pandemic renders all universally vulnerable. Responding to this contemporary threat, this project explores the scenario where an infectious disease carrier arrives by plane to Dulles International Airport in Washington, D.C., and a possible architectural response. The subsequent project proposes an “Interstice”, an in-transit, infectious disease treatment and containment facility to be located within the airport’s grounds. Purposely built for the accommodation of contagious passengers, the Interstice derives space, material, and form, from the passage of people between the outside (the realm of the unhealthy) to the inside (a place of relative health).

Performing a walking holiday: Routing, immersing and co-dwelling

This article discusses the relationship between space, material practices, cognitive work and the emotions at work during a personal walking holiday as a way of contributing to a wider debate on walking tourism. In doing so, this article revises the concept of ‘dwelling-in-motion’ and employs a mobile perspective that combines both the phenomenological and post-phenomenological approaches to tourism and walking studies, focusing on pace and rhythm, mundane technology and affective atmospheres. These are aspects that become entangled in walking touristscapes as they are produced and challenged by routing, immersive and co-dwelling performances. The article concludes by suggesting that, not only can a ‘mobile ontology’ provide a more thorough account of walking tourism, it can also highlight the importance of understanding the place-making potential of walking tourism as a complex tourist mobility practice for which both precognitive and cognitive implications should be considered.

Planar Offset Short Applicable to the Calibration of a Free-Space Material Measurement System in W-Band

The electrical properties of materials and their dependence on frequency and temperature are indispensable in designing electromagnetic devices and systems in various areas of engineering and science for both basic and applied researches. A free-space transmission/reflection method measuring the free-space scattering parameters of a material under test (MUT) located at the middle of transmit/receive antennas in a free space is suitable for non-destructively testing the MUT without prior machining or physical contact in high-frequency range. This paper describes a planar offset short applicable to the calibration of a quasi-optic based free-space material measurement system in the millimeter-wave frequency range. The measurement results of the dimensional and electrical properties for the three fabricated planar offset shorts with the phase difference of 120° between the reflection coefficients of the planar shorts in the W-band (75–110 GHz) are presented.