LINA Writing Award _ Learning with Ghosts
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
"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.”
