Rooted in Place: The Art of Context in Architectural Visualization

The jury's votes are in — Architizer is proud to present the winners of the 2025 Vision Awards! Join the program mailing list and continue celebrating the world's best architectural representations by clicking here. 

We are approaching the end of 2025, and AI technology has now fully embedded itself within the process of architectural visualization. However, like all early tools, AI offered an abundance of possibilities but little guidance, often leading to very homogenized images with a uniform aesthetic and an overall feeling of placelessness.

Still, that is not the case for this year’s Vision Awards Winners. Locality and place have been at the forefront of their visual storytelling, demonstrating that rootedness is ultimately a design attitude and not a technological limitation.

Below are six “rendered visions” produced both using AI tools as well as traditional representation techniques that showcase how technology can serve – rather than overshadow – specific cultures and, by extension, local narratives.

Freeway_Carpools by Greg Tate

2025 Vision Awards, Jury Winner, Rendering – AI Assisted Rendering

Large, spiraling concrete car lanes are transformed into pools and waterslides within Los Angeles. The project is both a speculation and a critique for the future of the city, setting up a juxtaposition of motion and stillness. Specifically, the car lanes act as vessels for water that flows rapidly through the concrete surfaces and seeks to ease the current monotony of traffic and congestion. Instead of reimagining a “environmental paradise” – erasing any trace of Los Angeles’ “ugly” side – this speculative imagery reframes the freeway as an artefact of aspiration and technological imagination.

Shelter/Weapon by Maryam Liaghatjoo

2025 Vision Awards, Editor’s Choice Winner, Rendering – AI Assisted Rendering

Contrary to Freeway_Carpools, the Shelter/Weapon project is not set in any specific location. Instead, it touches upon contemporary urgencies of war and the destruction of cities by showcasing a quiet bedroom that was once a refuge being violently demolished. Albeit its “placelessness”, the image powerfully communicates how architecture can be considered not just as casualty of war, but also as a participant, where bricks, concrete rubble and glass shards become weapons. The intricate details of posters and personal items found within the bedroom clash with the immense amount of rubble that frames a far-off explosion, happening at the distance, revealing the fragile boundary between urban safety and violence.

Everything But [in] The Kitchen Sink by Eilís Finnegan

2025 Vision Awards, Jury Winner, Rendering – Artistic Rendering

Similarly to Shelter/Weapon, this project adopts a very strange concept of locality. The everyday kitchen sink becomes the site of planetary calibration, where it is transformed into a microcosm of ecological interdependence. Wrapped in playful textures, house objects, plants as well as the necessary plumbing infrastructure open up conversations on waste and environmental consciousness. Visually, this Sinkscape is treated as a dense domestic interior, populated by imperfection and chaos, transforming this rather mundane element into a metaphorical stage for the messier infrastructures that sustain life.

The New Neighbor by Horoma Studio

2025 Vision Awards, Jury Winner, Rendering – Architecture + People

The New Neighbor takes an even more confrontational approach towards placelessness. The project is communicated through an image of a tower wrapped in cloth within a very American, suburban setting, and posing a simple question: what would you do if someone built a tower in your backyard? The visual stands as a very powerful critique, reflecting on the concept of displacement and showing how rooted lives can be easily overwritten due to ambitions that operate entirely out of context. It speaks of a global problem, where towers are rising and cultures are erased for the mere sake of having an impressive city skyline.

Disruptive Peri-scapes: An Exploration of Phantom Futures by Shelby Lewis

2025 Vision Awards, Finalist, Rendering – AI-Assisted Rendering

In this case, the visualization acts as both a speculative and analytical drawing. Situated on Tulare Lake in California’s San Joaquin Valley, the project records the re-emergence of the lake in 2023, which flooded over 120,000 acres of farmland. In parallel, it heavily critiques the current land usage of the region, which focuses more on agricultural productivity rather than ecological resilience. In response, the aerial image presents a multiverse of futures for the lake – dystopian , nomadic and hybrid – and where each “volume” operates as a self-contained world or, more widely, a different ecological narrative.

Te Ahi Kā by By TT Architects

2025 Vision Awards, Editor’s Choice Winner, Rendering – Architecture + Environment

Finally, returning to highly contextual visualization practices, Te Ahi Kā is deeply embedded in its natural setting. Situated in the Tongariro Northern Circuit in New Zealand, this hiker’s shelter draws from the intense volcanic landscape. The characteristic black rock is used as the primary material for the structure, while the building is framed in accordance with the distant volcano. Finally, the interior lighting is almost “fire-like”, touching upon the indigenous storytelling that is imbued within the site.

These projects are all playful, speculative and even satirical at times; more importantly though, they demonstrate an impressive practice of contextually based and critically attuned visualization. Each of these images reclaim authorship and grounds imagination in site as well as social narrative.

The jury's votes are in — Architizer is proud to present the winners of the 2025 Vision Awards! Join the program mailing list and continue celebrating the world's best architectural representations by clicking here. 

Featured Image: Disruptive Peri-scapes: An Exploration of Phantom Futures by Shelby Lewis ,2025 Vision Awards, Finalist, Rendering – AI-Assisted Rendering

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