This year's Rotch competitors faced challenges at every turn: a Korean religious center with a program that featured three assembly spaces, including a children's chapel; a tight, sloping site with an existing church; a total lack of information regarding another cultural tradition; and 10 days to design and present their projects. Most of us would have given up right there.

With $35,000 for a year of travel to gain, they persevered. Aaron Follett, the winner (thus earning the title "2004 Rotch Scholar"), condensed his building on the urban side of the site, stacking three compact stories behind a teak screen. Layering functional elements like a wedding cake, he organized the assembly spaces one per floor, moving up the building from secular to religious spaces, with community outreach activities on the ground, a classroom above, and a children's chapel on the top. He left the rest of the site untouched, and gained the jury's respect for the clearest of diagrams. His milky interior perspectives make one want to know how, with more time, he might materially create the feeling of being encased in translucent blue and peach jelly(!).

Elizabeth Kostojohn, the second-prize winner, and Jason Knutson, the alternate, also developed compelling projects, hers a dispersion of objects paying homage to the church and sheltering play areas and a garden, his a whirlwind of movement whose vortex was the children's chapel perched like a water tower over the church.

Yet, for all their skillful manipulation of space, form, and structure, the projects seemed to avoid the real questions that this project poses.What is spirituality to the Korean church-goers? How do they feel about their existing church and its image in the neighborhood? In a Korean family structure, how would parents hope to communicate "God" to their children? How do architects make sacred space for young people? Although the competitors were each allowed 100 words to describe their project, the words "God," "spirit," "sacred," "religious," "Korean," and "family" were noticeably absent.

Have the bible-thumpers stolen our vocabulary for life's (or architecture's) big questions? Or do we now believe that architecture should remain detached, abstract, and nonspecific? Perhaps it is also the perceived rules of architectural competitions that make it unlikely the designers would address the problematic intersections between culture and building.We, as designers, are taught to show what we know, not to reveal where we have questions or, worse, that we might lack answers. Instead, we fill in the empty spaces with our own "stuff" before we notice that the blanks aren't ours to fill – we are the messengers, not the message.

Not surprisingly, those blanks become minimalistic visions, even in the face of mounting evidence that laypeople do not share the same love of empty space that we architects are taught to prize. The best spiritual buildings may be uncluttered, but they are anything but empty: think of Tadao Ando's Chapel on the Water, with its gritty concrete walls and huge pool of water reflecting a single cross, or Faye Jones' nearly breathing wood skeletal chapel in the forest. Nature is a vital element. Spiritual space is emotional space, and it is full.

Spiritual meaning, cultural identity, and humility are difficult topics in our profession, yet they are also some of the most important lessons these Rotch Scholars may learn from their travels. They are just at the beginning of their journeys to one of the greatest cultural and spiritual spaces there is – the world – and as they experience the diversity of other countries, belief systems, and buildings, they may get more comfortable with knowing less, asking questions, and realizing how incomplete our mental and physical constructions really are.

- Tamara Roy AIA practices architecture and urban design at Von Grossmann & Company, teaches design at Northeastern University, and is a previous $15,000 second-prize winner of the Rotch Travelling Scholarship. This year's competition program was written by Brian Healy AIA.

The Rotch Travelling Scholarship was established in 1883 to advance architectural education through foreign study and travel. Rotch Scholars today are selected through an annual two-stage competition. For more information, go to www.rotchscholarship.org.