A former 1950s gas station in Hamburg, Germany, has been named Photo of the Year at the Architecture Photography Awards 2025, highlighting how photographers worldwide capture and interpret the built environment. The winning image, titled "Architectural Minimalism" by Michael Luetge, showcases the modest glass structure in Hamburg's Grindelviertel district, which once served as a petrol station defined by its sweeping canopy and is now preserved as a listed historic building.
The Architecture Photography Awards 2025 (APA 2025) announced winners across 20 categories, creating what organizers describe as a global atlas of perspective that demonstrates architecture's capacity to be seen as image, atmosphere, and narrative. The winning photographs span from Icelandic churches and Sicilian cloisters to futuristic alpine huts and lightning-struck Hong Kong skylines, offering diverse interpretations of architectural spaces around the world.
Luetge's winning photograph captures the former gas station at night as a composition of light, geometry, and urban memory, earning recognition in both the Photo of the Year and Night & Low-Light categories. The image frames the preserved structure against the darkness, emphasizing its clean lines and illuminated interior that transforms the everyday building into an artistic statement about architectural preservation and urban history.
Light and shadow emerged as dominant themes throughout the competition's various categories. Chi Ho Gary Ng claimed victory in the Light & Shadow category with "Concrete Memento," which captures sunlight streaming through the brutalist openings of Uji Station in Japan, dramatically spotlighting a solitary passerby on a staircase. Ng secured a second win with "Hong Kong in the Veil," an urban-scale composition where skyscrapers pierce through thick sea fog at Victoria Harbour, backlit by a rare crimson sunset and featuring the iconic silhouette of a traditional junk boat.
Several winning photographers approached architecture through creative metaphors and abstract interpretations. Omar Garcia's "Vertical Piano" transforms the stacked balconies of Rotterdam's Cooltoren tower into giant piano keys, captured in black-and-white at sunrise. Anthony Wang's "Ascension" offers an upward perspective into the atrium of Atlanta's Marriott Marquis, where John Portman's spiraling interior design seems to pull viewers skyward through the dramatic vertical space.
The relationship between architecture and natural landscape featured prominently in multiple award-winning images. Paulo Sousa's aerial photograph of the Monte Rosa Hut won the Drone and Aerial category, showing the metallic alpine structure glinting against the Swiss Alps while balanced delicately above the expansive Gorner Glacier. In Iceland, Joseph Dunatov captured Stykkishólmskirkja, a 1990 church designed by Jón Haraldsson, whose sculptural forms rise starkly against the coastal town's horizon, demonstrating how modern religious architecture interacts with dramatic natural settings.
Historic architecture received significant recognition through various winning entries. Dario Lo Presti's "Cloister of Monreale" won in the Historic Architecture category, framing the Arab-Norman architecture of Palermo's UNESCO World Heritage Site, where repeating arches echo centuries of traditional craftsmanship. Jürgen Hammermann's "Museum Staircase" transforms Duisburg's Küppersmühle Museum into a study of rhythm and circulation, while Parham Taghioff's photograph of the "Ice Cave" in Tehran fuses futuristic white curves with a living green wall, bridging contemporary design with natural elements.
Minimalism and abstraction took on intimate registers in several winning works. Masaki Yazaki's "Color Blocks," winner in the Minimalist category, isolates overlapping facades near his home, transforming everyday walls into geometric paintings that blur the line between architecture and abstract art. Josbel Tinoco's "Yellow Jam" pushes further into spatial fiction, dissolving orientation into a monochromatic yellow pattern that creates optical illusions of depth and dimension.
The 2025 awards demonstrated how architecture comes alive through human presence and environmental conditions. Mario Tarantino's "Interruption 1" captures a lone figure breaking the strict geometric rhythm of a building's design, showing how people animate architectural spaces. Elizabeth Crane's "Bridge to Nowhere" photographs California's Zampa and Carquinez bridges disappearing into fog, transforming solid infrastructure into something ethereal and delicate.
Dramatic weather conditions provided compelling backdrops for several winning photographs. Ming Cheng's "The Dark Knight Awaits" freezes a dramatic lightning strike over Hong Kong's IFC tower while car lights streak through the rainy city below, creating a dynamic urban scene that combines natural forces with human activity. In the black-and-white "Vertical City, Silent Peak," Shuchuan Liu photographs Tokyo's skyline from the Bunkyo Civic Center, juxtaposing the vertical rise of modern towers against the timeless presence of Mount Fuji in the distance.
Collectively, the APA 2025 winning photographs highlight the diverse ways architecture can be seen, experienced, and interpreted through photography. The competition results demonstrate how buildings and structures can be understood and emotionally felt through the changing contexts of time, atmospheric conditions, and the people who inhabit and move through these spaces, ultimately revealing architecture's role as both functional shelter and artistic expression in the modern world.
