Đorđe Bulajić: Spectres of the Concrete Atlantis

Đorđe Bulajić (Serbia) is a recipient of the 2024/25 LINA Writing Award, commissioned by the Irish Architecture Foundation (IAF). His forthcoming book, Spectres of the Concrete Atlantis, will be published in Autumn 2025 by the IAF, in collaboration with dpr-barcelona (Spain). This work is part of the LINA European architecture platform’s activities, co-funded by the European Union.

Now in its third year, the LINA Writing Award is part of the broader LINA European architecture programme. The award supports emerging writers whose work critically engages with architecture and the built environment. Bulajić was selected through a highly competitive process for the originality and conceptual strength of his proposal. Emmett Scanlon, Director of the IAF, commented: “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.” 

Spectres of the Concrete Atlantis reimagines the grain elevators and silos built across the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as proto-platforms of today’s digital infrastructure—uncovering architecture’s enduring entanglement with power, control, and evolving forms of capitalism. It features a visual essay revisiting these monumental structures in Buffalo, New York, nearly fifty years after Reyner Banham’s seminal A Concrete Atlantis: U.S. Industrial Building and European Modern Architecture, 1900–1925, alongside a conversation with Paul Goldberger—Joseph Urban Professor of Design at Parsons School of Design, former architecture critic for The New Yorker and The New York Times, and recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1984.

Bulajić’s publication is one of two due to be published in Autumn 2025: dpr-barcelona commissioned Jacques-Marie Ligot + Lucille Léger (France) for Learning with Ghosts.

Book synopsis
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 mesmerized 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. Not as monuments to progress, but as early interfaces, proto-platforms whose silence speaks the language of power and the ultimate desire to own. But ownership is no longer about possession; it is about access. The object dissolves. Only the transaction remains, infinitely refreshed.

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?

About the author
Đorđe Bulajić is an internationally awarded architect, academic, and researcher based in New York City. 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 (AUID PhD Program) at Politecnico di Milano. 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. Journal of Architecture, Arts & Theory, Territorio, Urban Design International (Springer Nature), Fuoco Amico and Serbian Architectural Journal and has been featured in exhibitions and conferences across Europe and the USA including Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. 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.

About LINA and the LINA Writing Award
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 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 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.

As member organisations of the LINA European architecture platform, the IAF and dpr-barcelona are collaborating on the LINA Writing Award (2023–29). Through the annual LINA Open Call, emerging writers are selected each year for a writing award and publication.

If you are an emerging professional and interested in participating in the LINA architecture programme, the LINA Open Call runs until July 31, 2025. LINA offers successful applicants potential opportunities for collaboration with LINA member organisations across Europe, including the IAF and dpr-barcelona.

Weblinks
LINA Writing Award / Irish Architecture Foundation / LINA open call / dpr-barcelona.