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 ...

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...

Inga Saffron: It's not just architecture, it's city life criticism

2014-04-21T14:29:00-04:00

Inga Saffron, who writes the "Changing Skyline" column for the Philadelphia Inquirer, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism this week. She talks with Dave Heller about the state of criticism today, and the changing attitudes towards cities.

Previously: Inquirer's architecture critic Inga Saffron wins Pulitzer Prize for criticism

Inquirer's architecture critic Inga Saffron wins Pulitzer Prize for criticism

2014-04-14T18:01:00-04:00

Inquirer architecture critic Inga Saffron on Monday won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. In its citation, the Pulitzer Committee cited Saffron "for her criticism of architecture that blends expertise, civic passion and sheer readability into arguments that consistently stimulate and surprise."

Art/Architecture critic Philip Kennicott wins Pulitzer Prize for criticism

2013-04-17T19:42:00-04:00

Kennicott’s entry included several pieces published in the Style section last year. One was a review in June of an exhibit of creations by the architect Kevin Roche at the National Building Museum.

Assessing Roche’s work, Kennicott wrote, “In the end, Roche’s reputation will rise or fall depending on what becomes of the corporate world he served. If the end of corporate America is a dystopian hell of environmental catastrophe, vast economic inequity and social instability, the corporate architects of our age will not be remembered fondly. But if our age yields to a better one, just as the tyrannies and kleptocracies of past centuries sometimes yielded (perhaps temporarily) to more enlightened, democratic societies, then Roche’s work might have the charm of baroque palaces, Egyptian pyramids and Parisian avenues.”