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.

Emmett Scanlon, Director of the IAF, said: “We are delighted to support Đorđe Bulajić through this year’s LINA Writing Award. His proposal stood out for its originality and critical depth, revisiting Banham’s legacy to interrogate the spectral life of architecture.  It is an imaginative investigation into how the built environment evolves, decays and resurfaces with new meanings. Supporting future talent and emerging voices like Đorđe’s is what makes this award so important. It  inspires us and challenges how we think about architecture today and into the future and aligns with the IAF’s mission to advance culture in architecture.”

Commenting from dpr-barcelona, Dr César Reyes Nájera said: “After careful deliberation, we have selected Learning with Ghosts by Lucille Léger and Jacques-Marie Ligot, a proposal that explores the immaterial aspects of architecture and the unseen forces that influence how our built environments are shaped. By focusing on light infrastructures such as lighthouses and buoys, the project invites us to consider how architecture embodies social structures, ways of living, and spatial organisation. In a time marked by rapid growth and forgetting, narratives like the one proposed by Lucille and Jacques-Marie inspire us to cultivate a symbolic and emotional connection with the spaces we create and inhabit.”

The IAF and dpr-barcelona will publish Đorđe Bulajić and Jacques-Marie Ligot + Lucille Léger’s books in the autumn of 2025, making their words and ideas heard within the European architecture community. We 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.

Collectively, we seek to promote emergent voices that will enrich the panorama of architectural thinking, and we were so inspired by the extensive talent of the 2025 submissions. It was a tough decision to select these emerging writers and their exciting projects with such high potential, and we look forward to immersing them in a collaborative environment to develop their cultural projects within the LINA programme’s parameters.

We look forward to sharing their works with you in the autumn and adding to the existing published suite available at The LINA Library and The Library Project in Dublin.

 

Book synopses

In the meantime, Đorđe Bulajić shares this synopsis of his upcoming publication, Spectres of the Concrete Atlantis:

“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?”

 

Jacques-Marie Ligot + Lucille Léger also share this synopsis of their upcoming publication:

“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.”

 

About the authors

Đorđe Bulajić  is an architect, academic, and researcher. He is currently a Research Scholar at Parsons School of Design – The New School, a Visiting Researcher at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft, and a PhD candidate in Architecture, Urban and Interior Design at Politecnico di Milano. He holds a B.Arch (RIBA Part 1) and an M.Arch (RIBA Part 2) from the University of Belgrade, where he also worked as a Teaching Assistant in the Department of Architecture and a Research Assistant on a collaborative project with the ETH Zürich DARCH Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning.

He is the recipient of the annual ‘Aleksej Brkić’ award (2019) and the ‘UnIATA ’20 World’s Best Graduation Projects Ever Created’ award (2020). From 2019 to 2022, his research was funded by the Serbian Ministry of Education, Science, and Technological Development (MPNTR). Currently, he holds a three-year open-subject scholarship from the Italian Ministry for Universities and Research (MUR) and has been awarded the IDEA League Student Grant for two consecutive years (2024 and 2025).

Đorđe has taught and lectured at Parsons School of Design, TU Delft, Politecnico di Milano, University of Tsukuba, University of Belgrade, and the Polytechnic University of Tirana. His research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including Vesper, Territorio, Urban Design International (Springer Nature), and Serbian Architectural Journal and has been featured in exhibitions and conferences across Europe and the USA. His ongoing research explores the phenomenon of windowless architecture, delving into the metaphysics of form, sealed spaces, and closed worlds within 20th- and 21st-century architecture.

 

Jacques-Marie Ligot + Lucille Léger collaborate to engage in a dialogue around a shared interest in intimate space, gestures, fragile architectures, and the body as a driver of space conception. By focusing on the impact and mobilisation of bodies within spaces, they both seek to examine the frictions between the material world and the flows that activate it. 

Lucille Léger creates hybrid installations blending domestic space, nature, and art. Her sculptures merge furniture with organic and human forms, exploring materials and their contexts. She has exhibited at venues including Fondation Pernod Ricard, Paris and Treize, London. She co-founded “Domestic Cults at Scale” and is part of “Groupe Liaison Concrète.”

Jacques-Marie Ligot interrogates his discipline by studying gestures, with particular attention to vernacular and intangible heritages. Working with installations, performances, and editions, his research revolves around three axes: intimate and collective narratives as design tools, disappearance and the invisible as spatial and political structures, and performative gestures to create an architecture of attention.

As a separate commission, also supported by LINA, Ligot and Léger travelled overland through France, Portugal and Spain to Ireland in April 2025. They visited Architecture at the Edge in Galway, and then stopped in Dublin to lead a workshop at the IAF Summer School, as part of Periple Duet, a residency-on-the-move with Lisbon Architecture Triennale. They are also planning a different collaboration with Architektūros Fondas in Vilnius, Lithuania.

 

About LINA

LINA stands for Learning, Interacting and Networking in Architecture. Now in its third year, LINA is a European platform: a network of 34 institutions working at the intersection of architecture and other fields related to spatial culture. It works to promote emerging thinkers and practitioners with the goal of steering design and building processes towards regenerative practices and principles of de-growth.

A growing alliance of museums, universities, research networks, foundations, triennials, biennials, and other European and Mediterranean organisations — LINA members — carries out a series of events taking place all over Europe. The programme is coordinated by the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Ljubljana and co-funded by Creative Europe.

 

About the LINA Writing Award

As member organisations of the LINA European architecture platform, the Irish Architecture Foundation (IAF) and architecture research and publishing practice dpr-barcelona are collaborating on the LINA Writing Award programme between 2023 and 2029. 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.

 

Past awards

The 2024 set of LINA Writing Award publications are available for purchase from dpr-barcelona and, in Ireland, from The Library Project:

Buy Curating Ecologies on Architecture by Patrícia Coelho (commissioned by IAF)

Buy Tender and Toxic Tales by Juri Velt (commissioned by dpr-barcelona)

The sold-out 2023 LINA Writing Award publications are Shallow Time: The Burren by Tom Cookson and Atlas of Urban Mythologies by Sergios Strigklogiannis and Francesca Cocchiara.

 

The next LINA Open Call

If you are an emerging professional and interested in participating in the LINA Architecture Programme, the next LINA Open Call will be announced on the LINA website in May 2025. LINA offers successful applicants potential opportunities for collaboration with LINA member organisations across Europe, including the IAF and dpr-barcelona.

 

Image: “Spectres of the Concrete Atlantis”. Collage by Đorđe Bulajić.