Image courtesy of Forensic Architecture

Forensic Architecture: Crowdsourcing the Grenfell Fire

A tragedy such as the Grenfell fire is inevitably captured for posterity by hundreds, if not thousands of onlookers. But could that footage be used to determine exactly what happens? Forensic Architecture plans to achieve just that

With the investigation still on-going, exactly how the Grenfell Tower fire occurred is not yet known, despite a clear sense that the building’s cladding played a key role.

However, while experts will likely use traditional methods to determine what happened, Forensic Architecture, a research group headed by Eyal Weizman and based at Goldsmiths, University of London, has a more innovative method that it plans to utilise.

Having established the Grenfell Media Archive, Forensic Architecture is calling on anyone with footage of the fire to upload it to the database, crowdsourcing a vast collection of recordings all taken from different viewpoints.

The plan is to map these onto a 3D model of the tower, pooling each video’s data to provide a comprehensive record of the fire’s spread.

“These pieces of footage will become a continuous ‘3D video’ of the fire, mapped onto our architectural model of Grenfell Tower,” Forensic Architecture wrote of the project. “The model will allow the user to investigate the fire, and will sit within a web platform which will ultimately act as a freely available public resource.”

Members of the public can submit their own footage to www.grenfellmediaarchive.org.