LINA Writing Award

As LINA member organisations, the Irish Architecture Foundation (IAF) and architecture research and publishing practice dpr-barcelona are collaborating on the LINA Writing Award programme. Through the annual LINA Open Call, emerging writers are selected each year for a writing award and publication.

The LINA Writing Award invites writers to contribute to LINA’s exploration of the worlds, landscapes, and realities encountered by emerging practices shaping future urban environments, with particular emphasis on new narratives that reflect the complexity of the social and environmental challenges ahead. Rather than merely descriptive works, the LINA Writing Award supports bold new stories, myths, and fictions in architecture and the city.

The LINA Writing Award recipients for 2025 are:

Đorđe Bulajić (Serbia) for Spectres of the Concrete Atlantis, commissioned by the IAF

Jacques-Marie Ligot + Lucille Léger (France) for Learning with Ghosts, commissioned by dpr-barcelona

This is the third annual writing award supported through the LINA Architecture Programme. The award recipients were selected through a competitive process based on the originality and creative strength of their submitted proposals and their interest in writing and communicating architecture in a critical way. Projects that explore pressing environmental concerns in the built environment from creative and interdisciplinary angles were particularly valued.

Collaboration with LINA Fellows

The LINA Writing Award supports the fellows to write their commissioned works. The IAF and dpr-barcelona will publish Đorđe Bulajić and Jacques-Marie Ligot + Lucille Léger’s commissioned books in the autumn of 2025, making their words and ideas heard within the European architecture community. The IAF and dpr-barcelona will also support the writers’ development through the process of working with professional editors, copy-editors, designers, and publishers, actively discussing how books are conceived, produced, and promoted and how to ensure they are tools for discussion and spaces of encounter.

Once published, their works will be added to the existing suite available at The LINA Library.

Book Synopses

 "Spectres of the Concrete Atlantis" by Đorđe Bulajić:

“An accidental avant-garde. It began with a photograph. Or more precisely, a misreading of one. In the rustbelt ruins of Buffalo, New York, where grain once moved faster than water, a movement was born without knowing it had been conceived. Photographs of grain elevators and silos, clipped from concrete engineering journals and construction manuals, circulated widely. Raw structures, anonymous and unapologetically utilitarian. Not designed, but calculated by civil, mechanical and agricultural engineers, these concrete leviathans mesmerised a rising generation of European architects: Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier, Erich Mendelson, Richard Neutra and others. A revolution was sparked, and the outcome would be called the International Style.

They saw purity, logic, a new aesthetic. But it was a mirage. They discovered a ‘style.’ But it was a system. An architecture of logistics, of speed, of production. The Amazon warehouse before Amazon. A spatial apparatus not just enabling capital but embodying it: calibrated to extract, to manipulate, to optimize, and to oppress. These were never simply ruins of industry, but early temples of transaction.

In an era where architecture struggles with its own utility – its relevance in the age of the internet, the ‘cloud,’ the server farm, the algorithm – Spectres of the Concrete Atlantis revisits these mute giants. Less nostalgia than prognosis, this book asks: How do the Spectres of the Concrete Atlantis haunt us today, long after their original purpose has faded? What does the obsolescence of one modernity reveal about the possibility of another? Who builds the next Atlantis? And who will write its myth?”

"Learning with Ghosts" by Jacques-Marie Ligot + Lucille Léger:

“Learning with Ghosts delves into the intangible dimensions of architecture, illuminating the invisible power dynamics that shape our built environment.

How do certain architectures reflect modes of existence, power dynamics, and the organisation of space and bodies? ‘Summoning ghosts’ is therefore about questioning the unspeakable — how architecture and design are able to represent the invisible aspects of everyday life.

Our proposal mobilises this concept to interrogate the agency of spaces as experienced through affect, particularly through light infrastructures such as lighthouses, buoys, and lamp posts. By focusing on these specific forms of architecture, they reveal how architectural influence extends beyond material presence. These structures orchestrate the rhythms of maritime activity and serve as powerful, evocative objects that shape both diurnal and nocturnal life.”