We are pleased to be joined by journalist and Architect Alison Killing for the 2023 Robin Evans lecture, both in-person and as an online streamed event.

'Investigating Xinjiang's network of detention camps'

China has built a vast network of detention camps in the north west region of Xinjiang, as part of its campaign of oppression against Turkic Muslims. It is believed that more than a million people have been detained. Our team used satellite imagery, architectural analysis and eyewitness interviews to uncover the camp network and investigate what was happening there. Alison will talk about the process of doing this Pulitzer Prize winning investigation, as well as the wider relevance of architectural skills in investigative journalism.

About the Speaker

Alison Killing is an investigative journalist and licensed architect. In 2021 she and her colleagues Megha Rajagopalan and Christo Buschek won the Pulitzer Prize for an investigation that uncovered a secret network of detention camps in Xinjiang, China. She is a senior reporter on the FT's Visual Investigations team.

About the Robin Evans Lecture Series

This series supports outstanding scholarship in the history of architecture and allied fields, building on the work of Professor Robin Evans (1944-1993). It encourages scholars working on the relationship between the spatial and social domains in architectural drawing, construction and beyond.

Evans’ work interrogated the spaces that existed between drawing and building, geometry and architecture, teasing out the points of translation often overlooked. From his early work on prison design and domestic spaces, through to his later work on architectural geometry, Evans sought to articulate the multiple points at which the human imagination could influence architectural form. His first book, The Fabrication of Virtue, analysed the way that spatial layouts provided opportunities for social reform via their interference with morality, privacy and class. In The Projective Cast: Architecture and its Three Geometries, Evans traced the origins of the humanist tradition to understand how human form influenced architectural drawing and construction, focusing on aesthetic dimensions in the production of architectural space.

This series will provide opportunities for the creation and/or dissemination of work by scholars working on similar questions of space, temporality, and architecture. In particular, it supports work that breaks the boundaries of traditional disciplines to think though these complex networks involved in the space between human imagination and architectural production.

The Robin Evans Lecture 2023