Archinect - News

Pulitzer Prize-winning architect Alison Killing to join Financial Times visual investigations unit

2023-10-16T18:41:00-04:00

Alison Killing, the British-born and Netherlands-based designer who in 2021 was named the first-ever architect to win the Pulitzer Prize, has been tapped to lead a new visual investigations unit supported by the Financial Times. The paper announced the appointment on Thursday.

Killing will work under the title Senior Investigations Reporter and expand on a body of work that includes the Putlizer-winning investigation for The New York Times into Muslim detention camps operating in China’s Xinjiang province. The published reporting led the country to withdraw from this year’s Venice Biennale while shedding light on the difficulties journalists and human rights advocates face in performing open-source research in authoritarian regimes across the world.

Killing was educated in the UK and later immigrated to the Netherlands to found her practice Killing Architects in 2010. The financial downturn of the time caused her to venture into curation and researching vacant buildings. She would ...

China exits Venice Biennale over Alison Killing's Xinjiang detention camp investigation

2023-05-26T15:36:00-04:00

Opening week for the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale wasn't short of excitement, reflection, criticism, and social commentary from the architecture community and the general public. With that said, another piece of controversial news was recently reported by the Italian news and analysis website Decode39 on the Chinese Embassy's decision to exit one of the largest international design and culture exhibitions.

According to Decode39, China withdrew from the event due to an installation titled Investigating Xinjiang’s Network of Detention Camps. Created by architect and urban designer Alison Killing of Killing Architects, the project aimed to explore and investigate the "network of detention camps built by the Chinese government in Xinjiang for the mass detention of Muslims."

Previously on Archinect: Architect Alison Killing has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her Chinese internment camp investigations

In 2021, Killing was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in the International Reporting cat...

Architect Alison Killing has been awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her Chinese internment camp investigations

2021-06-29T15:14:00-04:00

This year’s Pulitzer Prize committee has named an architect a winner in its International Reporting category, marking the first time someone in the field has won the prestigious journalism award in an area outside of criticism.

Alison Killing has been awarded the prestigious prize for an ongoing project using satellite imagery to track internment camps in China’s Xinjiang region. The sites are said to be harboring up to a million Muslim detainees made up of Uyghur and other minority groups that have been subject to brutal government repression for decades. Killing has been featured in Archinect before for a related project exploring a dialogue between death and architecture.

Related on Archinect: The architecture of death and dying

Killing was cited alongside BuzzFeed staffers Megha Rajagopalan and Christo Buschek to orchestrate a hunt for physical evidence of the camps using a Google Earth-like Chinese search engine called Baidu. Using the search engine, Killing’s team was able to...

The architecture of death and dying

2018-12-26T17:09:00-05:00

The idea of death and dying is a rather bleak subject. Many avoid discussion of the matter at all costs, while others plan to prolong its advancement as years pass. However, regardless of one's preconceived notions, death is a necessary part of life. Yet, perhaps our relationship and understanding of death can be changed with the help of architecture. Alison Killing, of Killing Architects, explains that "where we die is a key part of how we die." Her work as an architect and urban designer has allowed her to explore the notion of death and how architecture and urban strategy can help the general public understand the relationship between death and architecture.

In 2014, Killing spearheaded a project for the Venice Architecture Biennale called Death in Venice. Through the project, she dissected the architectural timeline of hospitals, hospices, cemeteries, and crematoriums to highlight how space is allocated fo...