5 Spiritual Spaces With Stunning Designs

(Above: Photo by Tuca Reines)

Beauty is a sort of lingua franca, a shared language that crosses borders and belief systems. The same goes for good design. And let me tell you, the spiritual spaces below are prime examples of stunning design, all the more transcendent because they encourage people to connect with a higher power — or tap into the power within. Whatever you believe in (God, Allah, the infinite wisdom of the universe), we have faith you’ll find wonder in the five spiritual spaces below.

Espaço de Oração, Brazil
São Paulo, Brazil

One look at these photos, and you immediately feel calm, right? In the gardens of São Paulo's Palácio dos Bandeirantes, this little chapel, a 2025 IIDA Global Excellence Award winner, keeps things simple — on purpose. It’s glass and wood, light and quiet. The large glass panels frame the existing trees rather than compete with them, blurring the boundary between architecture and garden. No grand gestures or heavy symbolism here. Just a place to pause, reflect, and look out at the trees. The design, by Carlos Rossi Arquitetura, feels like home — deliberately so, drawing from a classic residential archetype to create a sense of familiarity and welcome. It doesn’t shout sacred; it gently suggests it. A reminder that peace can be found all around us.

Sunlit minimalist chapel interior with long wooden benches facing floor-to-ceiling glass that frames mossy trees and lush garden foliage. — Photo by Tuca Reines

A glass A-frame chapel with warm wooden interior, rows of simple benches and soft amber lighting, set among tall trees at dusk. — Photo by Tuca Reines

Fractal Chapel at State Hospital Graz
Graz, Austria

Tucked inside an Austrian hospital, this tiny chapel (only 35 square meters, or about 115 feet) has a special effect: it starts soothing as soon as you step inside. That’s not opinion; it’s science. Fractal patterns shift with the daylight, scientifically proven to reduce stress and boost well-being. INNOCAD architecture, the designers behind the chapel, collaborated with 13&9 Design and Professor Richard Taylor at the University of Oregon to develop the patterns. According to Taylor’s research, repetition of fractal patterns triggers a natural relaxation response, cutting stress by up to 60%. Simple materials and a soaring ceiling add to the sense of serenity, and the centerpiece altar, crafted from an upside-down walnut rootstock, symbolizes the rootedness and transience of life.

Tall white perforated walls cast dappled light over a wooden floor, perimeter oak benches and a central raw tree-trunk altar table. — Photo by Paul Ott

Glass Pavilion
Bangkok, Thailand

In bustling Bangkok, on the fourth floor of True Digital Park — a vast mixed-use development housing Southeast Asia’s largest tech and startup hub — sits a serene space designed for meditation, reflection, and respite. That haven is the Glass Pavilion, designed by M Space, which blends contemporary design with traditional Thai architecture. The exterior calls to mind tiered Vihara (Buddist temple) roofs, and chedis, dome-shaped Buddhist monuments that house sacred relics. The pointed, arched entryway is a callback to another iconic space: Wat Sri Chum, a famed 13th-century Buddhist temple in Thailand’s Sukhothai Historical Park. Once inside, the walls mimic the layers of a lotus flower, a symbol of purity, laddering up to a soaring ceiling. It’s intimate and expansive. Warm, minimal, and meditative. And, of course, also ideal for meditation — reflective glass panels deflect sunlight while allowing bright light to shine in, and casement windows allow a gentle breeze to flow in.

A lit stepped wooden pavilion with symmetrical tiers and central glass entrance, reflected in a still pool between glass buildings. — Photo by Ketsiree Wongwan

Ballie Mosque
Elbasan, Albania

In Elbasan, a city in the center of Albania, you can feel history come alive. The Ballie Mosque sits in a section of Elbasan overflowing with historic architecture, including 2,000-year-old ruins, a medieval castle, and a communist-era theater. Now, there’s the new mosque, completed in 2023 by Commonsense Studio. Its predecessor, the 17th-century Balizade Mosque, was leveled in 1967, known as a “dark year” for religious identity. Fifty years later, the Elbasan Muftiate commissioned the new mosque, and Commonsense Studio designed a space that speaks to the present while honoring the past. The result leans on geometry, a staple of Islamic art and architecture, to bring the mosque’s facades, domes, and minarets to life, with openings that let light shift through the interior all day, so the space never looks quite the same twice. It’s built to hold 1,700 worshippers, but the feeling inside is anything but crowded. Just quiet, deliberate, and serene.

Spacious beige mosque interior with tall sunlit windows, Arabic calligraphy frieze, mihrab, minbar and lone man in green shirt. — Photo by Besart Cani

Honey-colored wooden panels spiral upward in concentric geometric folds toward an octagonal glass skylight with metal radial spokes. — Photo by Besart Cani

Into the Light — Christ Church
Neumarkt in der Oberpfalz, Germany

This old German church is proving renovation can be its own kind of transcendence. Over the last five 500 years, the building has served as a Catholic monastery and a Lutheran house of worship, but also a granary, a bakery, a military hospital, and a home. When Brückner & Brückner Architekten took on the project, they reconnected the chancel and nave, which had been broken apart, and raised the nave to create a seamless, step-free transition between the two spaces.

In the new design, boundaries fall away. Curved wooden ribs in the chancel — which were wrapped in reed and finished in clay plaster — and a mineral screed on the floor blur where wall ends and floor begins, dissolving the room’s corners. Completed in 2023, the space now reads as almost dematerialized, bathed in light from a source that can’t quite be pinned down. It’s beautiful and ethereal, built to support quiet reflection and lively community life, for worshippers young and old.