Drawn to the Future: 6 Best of the Year Winners Named for 2025 Vision Awards

Judging is underway for Architizer’s Vision Awards. The world’s best architectural concepts, ideas and imagery will be announced later this summer—stay updated by clicking here.

Now in its second season, the Architizer Vision Awards celebrates the creative power of architectural representation — the drawings, models, renderings, videos, photographs and conceptual projects that shape how the world understands design today. Built on the belief that powerful imagery can influence how architecture is conceived, understood and, ultimately, realized, the program shines a spotlight on the storytellers behind the scenes.

This year’s Vision Awards attracted hundreds of entries from across the globe, with submissions ranging from speculative urban designs to tactile models and cinematic films. Winners were selected across more than 50 categories by a prestigious international jury including Daniel Libeskind, Steven Holl, Lyndon Neri and Sanjay Puri, among others — each of whom brings a deep appreciation for the craft of architectural storytelling.

Among the many exceptional honorees, just six entries were selected as Best of the Year, representing the pinnacle of architectural visualization across six creative mediums: Conceptual, Drawing, Model, Photography, Rendering, and Videography. These winners exemplify the most innovative, evocative and technically masterful works submitted to this year’s program, each one offering a fresh lens through which to view architecture and its role in society.

Without further ado, we’re delighted to share this Vision Awards season’s Project of the Year winners:

Architectural Concept of the Year

LAND-CR.AF.T.ED (Community Reinvent Affordable Food Through Ecologic Design) by C+S Architects, Maria Alessandra Segantini

Additional Vision Award: Editor’s Choice in Vision for Housing

Led by creative director Maria Alessandra Segantini and partner Carlo Cappai of C+S Architects, Land-CR.AF.T.ED envisions a new rural paradigm at the intersection of regenerative agriculture and social housing. The proposal responds to depopulation in Italy’s countryside with a holistic vision: a microcosm of raw-earth homes, pixel-farms, irrigation basins and re-wilded forests organized into a circular masterplan that blends ecology with community.

Prefabricated and low-carbon, the twelve housing units reinterpret Tuscan farmhouses with timber and oxidized zinc, realized using 3D-printing techniques. Rooted in Segantini’s memories of Emilia Romagna, the concept imagines a future where rural life is not abandoned, but reactivated — cultivating belonging, food sovereignty and circular living for multi-generational, multicultural communities.

Architectural Drawing of the Year

The Archatographic Map of the Incomplete Landscapes on Pedra Branca by Eugene Tan

Additional Vision Award: Editor’s Choice in Vision for Computer Aided Drawing

Inspired by medieval mappamundi, Eugene Tan’s richly layered drawing collapses time, perspective and terrain into a speculative cartography of Pedra Branca — a once-inaccessible island long defined by political dispute. With aerial perspectives, composite elevations and cyclical environmental data, Tan reclaims the island as an ecological and imaginative landscape (as opposed to the usual geopolitical abstraction).

The drawing’s hybrid technique invites viewers to imagine themselves on the island, experiencing its seasonal cycles and rich ecology. Through this visual approach, the drawing aims to shift the narrative from territorial conflict to ecological wonder. More than documentation, this map acts as an act of re-narration, where land is not owned or defended, but rendered in relational terms.

Architectural Model of the Year

Theseus by Joe Russell & Emma Sheffer

Additional Vision Award: Jury Winner in Vision for Reuse and Renovation

Theseus reimagines maritime infrastructure as a bold new model for resilient urban housing. Designed for the Port of Chelsea, Massachusetts, the project repurposes decommissioned bulk-carrier ship hulls — typically discarded after 25 years — into adaptable, suspended housing blocks.

The model reveals a modular superstructure of curved steel frames and timber enclosures, elevated above a floodable civic landscape. With flexible units that expand and contract over time, Theseus blurs the line between home and infrastructure, offering a powerful response to climate resilience, material circularity and collective living. It’s housing as civic architecture; robust and rooted in place, as the model potently projects.

Architectural Photograph of the Year

Eagle + West by Jason O’Rear Photography

Additional Vision Award: Jury Winner in Best Photograph – Architecture & Urban Life

This cinematic image of Eagle + West captures the geometric audacity of the waterfront towers in a single, vertigo-inducing frame. Taken by Jason O’Rear from a helicopter high above Brooklyn, the shot required precision flying and compositional agility to align the staggered towers with the Manhattan skyline beyond.

Harsh winter winds and fading light pushed the limits of technical endurance, but the result is a masterclass in visual storytelling: crystalline reflections in the East River, crisp contrasts between glass and concrete, and a staggering scale that asserts architecture’s ability to shape the skyline. The contrast between the two Burroughs invites the viewer to imagine both a not-so-distant future, where Brooklyn reaches vertiginous heights, as well as a not-so-distant past, before Manhattan reached for the sky. Meanwhile, the new tower’s stacked, blocky profile stands apart from the rectilinear skyscrapers of the 20th century.

Architectural Rendering of the Year

The New Neighbor by Horoma Ltd

Additional Vision Award: Jury Winner in Best Rendering – Architecture + People

This powerful image turns the tools of commercial visualization inward, using photorealism not to sell fantasy, but to critique it. Revisiting the NIMBY debate with fresh urgency, the rendering places a gleaming tower within the quiet fabric of a suburban backyard — a confrontation between lived domesticity and unchecked urban ambition. Rather than indulging in spectacle, the composition foregrounds the banality of displacement: lawn chairs, siding, and chain-link fences.

Rendered in the familiar vernacular of American suburbia, the image subtly indicts the global patterns of erasure masked by architectural progress. In doing so, it reframes the role of architectural imagery — not just to seduce, but to challenge, disrupt and ask difficult questions.

Architectural Video of the Year

Counterweight by Olson Kundig

Additional Vision Award: Jury Winner, Best Video – Profile or Interview

Directed by Austin Wilson and Christian Sorensen Hansen with creative direction by Alan Maskin (principal/owner, Olson Kundig) and Ciara Cronin (Director of Marketing), Counterweight is a cinematic meditation on movement — both mechanical and conceptual. Through crisp cinematography and evocative editing, the film captures the spirit of Olson Kundig’s innovative kinetic architecture, where wheels, levers and counterbalances transform buildings through human touch.

Anchored by the creative partnership between Olson Kundig architect Tom Kundig and resident “gizmologist” Phil Turner, the video reveals a design ethos rooted in curiosity and invention. Hansen’s layered visuals, Wilson’s narrative clarity and the guiding vision of Maskin and Cronin converge to explore the visceral poetry of motion, offering a rare glimpse into architecture’s ability to move both body and mind.

Judging is underway for Architizer’s Vision Awards. The world’s best architectural concepts, ideas and imagery will be announced later this summer—stay updated by clicking here.

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