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.
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 find a bug that placed tens of thousands of light-grey masking tiles over the camp sites, concealing evidence of what the team eventually discovered to be 260 prison-like structures constructed between 2017 and the report’s publication in August of 2020.
An additional 100 structures have been found since the publication of the first article.
China's Baidu has blank spots in its mapping platform. We used those blank locations to look for the network of prisons and internment camps in Xinjiang, where up to a million Muslim minorities have been detained. Here's how we did it. https://t.co/Icpm96Ccx0
— Alison Killing (@alisonkilling) August 27, 2020
Born in Newcastle, Killing earned degrees from King’s College, Cambridge and Oxford Brookes before moving to Rotterdam. Killing founded her own practice in 2010 with a stated interest in working around issues related to migration and surveillance technology. Killing is the first architect to win the Pulitzer in any category since 1996. Robert Campbell, who won in the Criticism category for his writing in the Boston Globe, is also a licensed architect and worked in Josep Lluis Sert’s office for many years.
A full archive of Killing’s Pulitzer-winning BuzzFeed posts can be found here.
5 Comments
that’s my kind of architect!
It's amazing that this isn't getting so much more press. Great work!
Maybe people think that investigating China puts one automatically in the Trump corner with his anti-China rethoric and sentiments?
Not sure how it works out politically, but everyone should be against the dehumanization of people wherever and whenever .
amazing!
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