photo of 1950s petrol station crowned winner of APA 2025

former petrol station wins photo of the year

The Architecture Photography Awards 2025 (APA 2025) announces its winners across 20 categories, presenting a survey of how photographers around the world interpret the built environment. From Icelandic churches and Sicilian cloisters to futuristic alpine huts and thunder-lit Hong Kong skylines, winning photographs form a global atlas of perspective that underscores architecture’s capacity to be seen as image, atmosphere, and narrative.

In the Photo of the Year and winner of the Night & Low-Light category, Michael Luetge’s Architectural Minimalism captures a former 1950s petrol station in Hamburg’s Grindelviertel. Once defined by its sweeping canopy and now preserved as a listed building, the modest glass structure is framed at night as a composition of light, geometry, and urban memory.

Windows 5.9 by Werner Schwehm, winner in Windows

Architecture Photography Awards 2025 Explore Light and form

Light and its absence emerge as recurring protagonists in the rest of the awards categories as well. In Chi Ho Gary Ng’s Concrete Memento, sunlight funnels through the brutalist openings of Uji Station in Japan, spotlighting a solitary passerby on a staircase. His second APA 2025 winning entry, Hong Kong in the Veil, shifts to an urban scale, where skyscrapers pierce through thick sea fog at Victoria Harbour, backlit by a rare crimson sunset and the iconic silhouette of a junk boat.

Other winning images approach architecture through metaphor. Omar Garcia’s Vertical Piano renders the stacked balconies of Rotterdam’s Cooltoren tower as giant piano keys, illuminated at sunrise in black-and-white. Anthony Wang’s Ascension looks upward into the atrium of Atlanta’s Marriott Marquis, where John Portman’s spiraling interior seems to pull the viewer skyward.

Several works emphasize architecture’s dialogue with landscape. Paulo Sousa’s aerial view of the Monte Rosa Hut, winner of the Drone and Aerial category, shows the metallic structure glinting against the Swiss Alps, balanced delicately above the expanse of the Gorner Glacier. In Iceland, Joseph Dunatov photographs Stykkishólmskirkja, Jón Haraldsson’s 1990 church, whose sculptural forms rise starkly against the coastal town’s horizon.

Architectural Minimalism by Michael Luetge, photo of the year, winner in Night & Low-light

From Palermo’s Cloisters to Tehran’s Ice Cave

Dario Lo Presti’s Cloister of Monreale frames history and captures the Arab-Norman architecture of Palermo, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, where repeating arches echo centuries of craftsmanship. Jürgen Hammermann’s Museum Staircase turns Duisburg’s Küppersmühle Museum into a study of rhythm and circulation, while Parham Taghioff’s shot of Ice Cave in Tehran fuses futuristic white curves with a living green wall.

Minimalism and abstraction take on intimate registers. Masaki Yazaki’s Color Blocks isolates overlapping facades near his home, transforming everyday walls into geometric paintings. Josbel Tinoco’s Yellow Jam goes further into spatial fiction, dissolving orientation into a monochromatic yellow pattern of depth and illusion.

Cloister of Monreale by Dario Lo Presti, winner in Historic Architecture

architecture shaped by people, time and atmosphere

APA 2025 shows how architecture is brought to life by people and the environment around it. Mario Tarantino’s Interruption 1 captures a lone figure breaking the strict rhythm of a building’s design. Elizabeth Crane’s Bridge to Nowhere photographs the Zampa and Carquinez bridges in California disappearing into fog, turning solid infrastructure into something delicate. 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.

In black-and-white Vertical City, Silent Peak, Shuchuan Liu photographs Tokyo’s skyline from the Bunkyo Civic Center, setting the vertical rise of its towers against the timeless presence of Mount Fuji. Together, the APA 2025 winning photographs highlight the many ways architecture is seen and experienced. They show how buildings can be understood and felt through the changing contexts of time, atmosphere, and the people around them.

Concrete Memento by Chi Ho Gary Ng, winner in Light & Shadow