A licenced architect has won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, becoming the first architect to win the prestigious journalism award outside the field of criticism.
Alison Killing, a British-born, Rotterdam-based architect, won the award together with Buzzfeed News reporter Megha Rajagopalan and programmer Christo Buschek for a series of stories revealing secret prisons and internment camps built in China’s Xinjiang province to detain Muslim minorities.
Described by the Pulitzer board as “clear and compelling,” the series drew on publicly available satellite imagery and architectural expertise, as well as interviews with two dozen former prisoners, to identify the extent of the infrastructure built by the Chinese government.
The investigation identified 260 structures built between 2017 and 2020 bearing the hallmarks of fortified detention compounds, making up “a sprawling system to detain and incarcerate hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minorities, in what is already the largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II.”
Funded by the Open Technology Fund, the investigation was published by Buzzfeed in four parts from August 27 2020. Earlier analyses of satellite imagery had revealed dozens of camps being built, with an Australian Strategic Policy Institute report published in November 2018 identifying suspected camps in 28 locations and a Reuters and Earthrise report published later in that same month identifying 39. Since first publishing, Killing and the investigative team have identified a further 100 suspected camps.
A rendering of a camp at Mongolküre, Xinjiang by Alison Killing for Buzzfeed News.
Image: Alison Killing for Buzzfeed News
Speaking to Architectural Record, Killing explained how she drew on her urban planning experience to narrow down where camps were likely to be, and her architecture expertise to identify architectural characteristics of prisons. “I was used to looking at the world from above and understanding how something two-dimensional will look in three dimensions,” she said.
The breakthrough moment for the investigation was when the team discovered evidence of censorship on the Chinese mapping platform Baidu Maps – in the form of blank grey tiles – around known camp locations. The researchers were then able to look for further instances of these blanked out tiles (they found 5 million) and narrow it down from there.
“After looking at 10,000 mask tile locations and identifying a number of facilities bearing the hallmarks of detention centers, prisons, and camps, we had a good idea of the range of designs of these facilities and also the sorts of locations in which they were likely to be found,” they explain in part three of the investigation.
Killing studied architecture at Cambridge and Oxford Brookes, before working at a number of architecture and urban design practices in London and then Rotterdam. In 2010 she founded the design and research practice Killing Architects, which aims to usearchitecture and urban planning skills “to investigate urgent social issues, from surveillance in cities to migration…”
Along with winning the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting, Killing, Rajagopalan and Buschek were also finalists in the explanatory reporting category. The prize is also the first for Buzzfeed News.
Seven architecture critics have won in the criticism category since it was introduced in 1970, and one of them, Robert Campbell of the Boston Globe, is also an architect.
