This issue features a microinterview with Eyal Weizman, conducted by Alex Carp. Weizman is the director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Together with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, he’s one of the founding members of Decolonizing Architecture, an architectural studio/residency based in Bethlehem that uses architecture as a tool for expression and political activism within the conflicts of Israel and Palestine. His next book, Least of All Possible Evils, will be published by Verso in the fall. The bulk of his design work focuses on how architecture might address political problems; much of his writing focuses on how, in settings varying from war zones to occupations and familiar city centers, it has failed to do so. The Believer had a chance to speak with him during the Creative Time Summit at Cooper Union, where he presented some of his recent work.

–Alex Carp

PART I

THE BELIEVER: I read an interview you did with a security consultant, someone who designs security apparatuses for federal buildings to protect against terror attacks. It seems like in American cities the architectural evidence of a country engaged in a war on terror is very hidden. It’s not obvious until you go out and read about it and then start to look for it. Is the hiddenness of it a relatively recent development?

EYAL WEIZMAN: People tell you that architecture is built to protect you against the elements. Primarily architecture is built to protect you from other people. More interesting for me is the way in which power operates through an ability to both control and interrupt. So, for instance, the wall—I’m not so much interested in the wall as a fortification, as a blast rampart, or this type of thing, but the way in which it is an apparatus that controls the flow of all sorts of things through it—the flow of people, the flow of infrastructure, the flow of goods, the flow of money, the flow of disease.

I think too much has been made out of the territorial issue of the wall in the West Bank. What’s interesting is to see how the wall operates. Look at Gaza, bounded by a perimeter fence that is its master. How many calories should enter into Gaza? Israeli soldiers sit and calculate this, which has been documented by NGOs. Two thousand one hundred calories per adult male, one thousand seven hundred calories per adult woman, then children according to gender and age, and that’s what’s flowing. Or electricity. How many megawatts should be allowed in? How much water should enter? That’s what the wall does—it’s a membrane that regulates and controls people by modulating...