Since the start of the Syrian civil war in 2011, Syrian authorities under president Bashar Hafez al-Assad have quietly carried out the systematic killing and torture of thousands in its custody at Saydnaya Military Prison, located just outside of Damascus. Earlier this month, the human rights organization Amnesty International released a report that claimed as many as 13,000 people were hanged in Saydnaya over the past five years in what they termed a “policy of extermination.”

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The report, which can be downloaded and read in full here, details the horrors experienced by the detainees and calls for an “independent and impartial investigation into crimes committed at Saydnaya.” To aid them with their campaign for independent monitoring of the prison, Amnesty collaborated with Forensic Architecture, a research agency at Goldsmiths, University of London that uses “architectural evidence” to work on behalf of international prosecutors, human rights organizations, and political justice groups. Together, they’ve created an interactive model of Saydnaya prison—a place completely closed off to outsiders—using only aerial satellite images and the testimonies of former detainees.

Many architects refuse to design spaces for inhumane imprisonment, killing, or torture, under the belief that it would make them complicit in those acts. For Forensic Architecture, recreating the design of one of the most inhumane prisons in the world was crucial for holding the Syrian government accountable for the atrocities being carried out there in secret. In April 2016, the architects traveled with a team from Amnesty International to Istanbul to meet five former detainees who had survived Saydnaya. The prisoners helped the architects create an interactive 3D model of the prison from memory, carefully piecing together the area of arrival, the solitary and group cells, long corridors, and spaces where the inmates were subjected to brutal torture. On the project page of Amnesty International’s website, where the model lives, users can explore the prison through a series of videos, text, and animations that detail both the prisoners’ experiences as well as the process by which they collaboratively designed the interactive.

The architects interviewed the former detainees about their memories of Saydnaya, but that methodology was complicated by the fact that, while inside, the prisoners often couldn’t see their surroundings. Many of the inmates were held in solitary confinement cells that were underground and existed in complete darkness. In the group cells above ground, when guards entered the cells, they forced inmates to kneel facing the wall with their palms over their eyes. This was to ensure that they couldn’t see the guards’ faces or the beatings that took place behind their backs. After an uprising by detainees in 2008, prisoners were no longer allowed to leave their cells except for tortuous interrogations, at which point they were typically blindfolded or told to keep their eyes closed.

Stripped of their sense of sight and prohibited from speaking or moving around, prisoners’ developed an acute sense of sound that allowed them to perceive distance, specific objects, and a sense of where they were based on what they heard. By interviewing them about their auditory memories, architects were able to use those that they termed “ear-witness testimonies,” as well as their visual memories, to build out the digital model.

Forensic Architecture further details this process in the

A. Witnesses listened to tones of different decibel levels, and were then asked to match them to the levels of specific incidents inside the prison. B. We used “echo profiling” to determine the size of spaces such as cells, stairwells, and corridors. This involved playing different reverberations and asking witnesses to match them with sounds they remembered hearing in the prison. C. We also used “sound artefacts” to simulate prison sounds such as doors, locks, and footsteps, which helped to generate further acoustic memories.

You can see some of these things in practice in the videos that pop up as you click around the model. Selecting on the area labeled “Arrival Truck,” for instance, takes you to two videos describing the “welcome party”—the severe beatings that the prisoners receive when they arrive at the prison. The prisoners are transferred from other detention centers in a meat truck, but are not told where they are going; if they did find out, most of them knew Saydnaya as the end of the line. In a video, a former detainee named Jamal Abdou described the journey to Saydnaya in the “meat fridge,” as the prisoners call it, which ends with them waiting fearfully for the guards to come get them, having already heard what to expect from the brutal “welcome party.” “And then we heard that depressing sound we knew from the detention centers,” he says in the video, which recreates the arrival experience in a 3D animation. “The sound that never leaves the mind of any detainee: the sound of the metal door lock. A sudden clang and then an echo.”