WINNERS

Purgatory Paradise

  • Photographer
    Sinziana Velicescu, United States
  • Prize
    Architecture Photographer of the Year / Gold Winner in Architecture/Buildings

Purgatory, Paradise examines civic and commercial architecture across the American landscape—corporate centers, museums, strip malls, municipal buildings—photographed in moments of stillness. Stripped of activity, these buildings lose their specific functions and begin to resemble one another: clean facades, flat planes, sun-bleached surfaces. Institutions shift toward abstraction, and structures once built to signal progress and permanence now appear suspended between promise and uncertainty.