The agency develops new evidentiary techniques and undertakes advanced architectural and media research[2] with and on behalf of communities affected by state violence, and routinely works in partnership with international prosecutors, human rights organisations and political and environmental justice groups.

[7] The project developed as a response to several converging phenomena, such as the urbanisation of warfare, the erosion of trust in evidence in relation to state crimes and human rights violations, the emergence and proliferation of open source media (or 'image flotsam'), the increased use of smartphone footage in documenting human rights violations in urban conflict, and the need for civil society to have its own means of evidence production for application in law, politics and advocacy.

[8] The first project undertaken by Forensic Architecture was an investigation into the killing of Bassem Abu Rahma in Bil'in, for human rights lawyer and activist Michael Sfard, which was eventually presented to the Supreme Court of Israel.

That team, called Forensic Oceanography,[12] published its first report in 2012, investigating of the deaths of seventy-three migrants who were left drifting for two weeks within NATO's maritime surveillance area.

By analysing the shape and movement of bomb clouds captured in mobile phone footage, Forensic Architecture's researchers located and mapped hundreds of Israeli strikes on the city.

[22] In 2017, Forensic Architecture produced a video investigation into the presence of a member of the German intelligence services at the scene of the 2006 killing by neo-Nazis of a Turkish internet cafe owner.

[5] The results of their video and written reports were ultimately referenced in both federal and state parliamentary inquiries in Germany, as well as the trial of the remaining NSU members in Munich.

[23] In April 2018, it was announced that Forensic Architecture were one of four nominees for the 2018 Turner Prize for their work relating to the killing of Yacoub Abu Al-Qia'an in Umm al-Hiran, but ultimately they lost out to iPhone artist Charlotte Prodger.

[40] The ways in which the investigations by Forensic Architecture oscillate between judicial proof and art work is subject of an ongoing theoretical debate on evidence, aesthetics, and third-generation institutional critique.