Where Light Lingers and Time Slows: Atmosphere as Structure in 7 Spiritual Spaces

The winners of the 13th Architizer A+Awards have been announced! Looking ahead to next season? Stay up to date by subscribing to our A+Awards Newsletter.

What makes a space spiritual? It’s not always an explicitly religious expression; in fact, often, it’s not. Sometimes it’s the quiet, the light, or the way a space seems to hold you in place, asking nothing but your presence. Spirituality doesn’t have to be served as symbols or sermons. It can be found in how a building slows you down and marks time. It can also be felt in how a space allows you to experience grief, peace, reverence or healing.

This collection brings together seven A+Award-winning projects that explore what it means to design for the spirit. Each one reflects a different approach — some material, some spatial, some sensory — but all invite us to experience space in the most intentional and sacred ways. These spaces don’t follow a single typology. They’re not all churches, mosques or temples. Some are memorials, gardens, halls or centers. What ties them together is atmosphere and attention, not function or belief.

Spirituality in architecture is not bound to faith alone. It lives in how spaces slow us down, open our senses, and connect us to something larger than ourselves. The seven projects in this collection show that a spiritual space can be made from rails and ballast, paper and plaster, water and light. What matters is the care with which they frame silence, movement and attention.

Rails of Memory

By Blaising Borchardt Studio, Lyon, France

Jury Winner, Religious Buildings & Memorials, 13th Architizer A+Awards

In Lyon, where trains once carried deportees to Auschwitz, Rails of Memory traces the history through distance and weight. A stretch of rail runs for exactly 3,850 feet (1,173 meters), representing one thousandth of the journey between Lyon and the camp. The memorial reuses real railway materials such as rails, sleepers and ballast to ground memory in matter. The designers aimed to turn movement into mourning and created a long silent procession. As visitors walk the path, there are no walls or symbols but the ground beneath them. It is a space that invites presence and in that presence, memory becomes sacred.

Ritual Space

By Geomim, Bodrum, Türkiye

Jury Winner, Wellness and Spa, 13th Architizer A+Awards

Ritual space lives up to its name by turning architecture into ceremony. The design consists of a network of narrow corridors and sunken courtyards that intend to slow the body down and draw focus inward. Geomim used rammed earth floors and plaster walls to echo the colors of the soil. They created skylights to pull sunlight into the dark chambers underground to guide visitors to sunlit terraces.  The meditation pavilion at the center rises in a circular form that echoes the spinning motion of the Sema ceremony. In this project, shade, texture and light work together to lead visitors inward until their stillness feels complete.

The Breeze Hall

By SHISUO Design Office, Shanghai, China

Jury Winner, Cultural Pavilion, 13th Architizer A+Awards

In Shanghai, SHISUO Design Office transforms a fenced-off patch of woodland into The Breeze Hall. Trees once trapped behind barriers now stand on an open lawn, anchoring a steel pavilion with wing-like eaves. Visitors step into a vast space, forty-two meters long and filled with soft breezes drawn through the roof. Rainwater collects in a pool, feeding evaporation that cools the air. Plaster walls feel warm to the touch, and light shifts with the day. At sunset, the façade glows through branches, holding the quiet between sacred pause and daily return.

Garden for the Eyes

By c+d studio, Shanghai, China

Jury Winner, Architecture +Art, 13th Architizer A+Awards

In Shanghai, c+d studio creates Garden for the Eyes as an abstracted Jiangnan garden. Visitors enter a space built almost entirely from handmade paper, its fibers textured like nature. Light filters softly across walls, guiding the visitors’ view toward framed scenes and ink paintings placed with precision. Openings act as windows for the eyes, controlling the rhythm of what they see. Each step reveals a new composition, and each pause invites the mind to widen. Here, looking becomes a journey; and in that journey, the act of seeing turns into a quiet ritual.

The ET-302 Memorial

By Alebel Desta Consulting Architects and Engineers, Gimbichu, Ethiopia

Popular Choice Winner, Religious Buildings and Memorials, 13th Architizer A+Awards

In Gimbichu, the ET-302 Memorial guides visitors through absence, revelation, and healing. A main path retraces the flight’s last six minutes and forty-four seconds, leading toward four inclined concrete forms that mark the crash site. Each form carries the scale and texture of Ethiopia’s rock-hewn monuments, with plaques set like aircraft windows recording the lives lost. Underground and open-air spaces invite quiet reflection. Rock gardens, shaded walks, and a circular burial ground hold the weight of grief in stillness. Every step carries the story forward from loss, through remembrance, toward renewal.

Diffuse Mirror

By António Costa Lima Arquitectos, Portugal

Jury Winner, Architecture + Light, 13th Architizer A+Awards

On the edge of a dam, Diffuse Mirror rises like a pier into still water. Visitors step onto pinewood posts and into a chapel wrapped in a palisade of rough, conical sticks. Light seeps through narrow gaps, scattering across the floor, changing with the day and season. A single window draws their gaze to the water’s surface; another opens only to the sky. The cross, carved with the word “Agape,” anchors the structure in place. Here, sound, smell, and touch work with light to still the body and open the mind.

Water Pavilion, Longqiyuan

By The Design Institute of Landscape & Architecture, China Academy of Art, Wenzhou, China

Popular Choice Winner, Architecture +Environment, 13th Architizer A+Awards

In the valleys of Wenzhou’s Longqiyuan Scenic Area, Water Pavilion rests on a ridge between three bodies of water. Visitors approach under the shade of preserved trees, stepping into a space formed by three curved roofs. Each roof opens toward a different stretch of water, lifting to create an entrance and dipping low to meet the surface. Light filters through narrow seams, shifting as visitors move. Reflections ripple underfoot. From each angle, the pavilion offers a new composition of water, shadow, and time.

The winners of the 13th Architizer A+Awards have been announced! Looking ahead to next season? Stay up to date by subscribing to our A+Awards Newsletter.

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