“It was a blink and you miss it thing”, architect-turned-journalist Alison Killing tells a packed-out auditorium of the discovery which earned her a Pulitzer prize. “It was like, okay, something is happening here”.
Killing is best-known for her work uncovering detention camps in Xinjiang, China, where more than a million Turkic Muslims have been interned since 2017. “They disappeared in the middle of the night”, Killing says. “Nobody knew where they were going.
“The families weren't told, nobody knew where these facilities were”.
To this day, Killing doesn’t know if she and her colleagues have found all of the camps. But in 2018, she became involved in a project which would locate hundreds of them from thousands of miles away. Her efforts would make her a household name in media.
Eight years prior, Killing was living a very different life. After years of working for architectural firms in London and Rotterdam, she struck out on her own, setting up her own practice. But things didn't go to plan.
“What was less ideal was that it was the height of the economic crisis and nobody was building, and especially not me”, she continues. But this misfortune ended up being the turning point which led her to gradually change career paths.
“I started trying to find work by doing all the things that I found interesting. I followed my nose. I did the research into the reconstruction of Haiti after the earthquake in 2010, I did some community design projects, I did an exhibition about death and architecture”.
Eventually, this led to data-driven journalism and open source investigations — fields which were rapidly gaining traction as practices in their own right, separate from more traditional media. She eventually learned about what was happening in Xinjiang and, using her technical prowess, began to investigate.
Zooming in on what was widely understood to be one of the camps at the time, she noticed a white square flashing up at one level.
“There'd be this white square that would come up, it was a little bit like it wasn't loading, but then you'd zoom in further and it would disappear.
“I noticed that it kept happening, and I knew that that shouldn't be happening”.
That moment led Killing to the realisation that multiple areas of the region were covered by similar white squares. Working with journalist Megha Rajagopalan and information technologist and investigative journalist Christo Buschek, Killing used data-driven techniques from her previous career to uncover the vast network of camps across the region.
In 2021, she and her colleagues were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Since 2023, she has worked on the Financial Times’s visual investigations team.
Killing was invited to tell her story as part of the Barbican’s ongoing Architecture on Stage series, which is also set to host a screening of The First Siza, a documentary about Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza; and Kingdom of the Sick, a talk on ‘the architecture and topography of disease’ with architect Andrea Bagnato and journalist Oliver Basciano. All are being held at the Barbican Centre, one of London’s — and the world’s — most iconic brutalist complexes.
All of these talks invite us to consider the wider applications of architectural practice, and the way it impacts our everyday lives. For Killing, architecture was a route into a very different career path — and one she had never initially considered.
Architecture on Stage continues with The First Siza on 28 and 29 January at the Barbican Centre. Find out more here.
