Architecture and Design Festival Concéntrico celebrates its 10th anniversary from 25 April to 1 May 2024 with an edition that aims to reflect on the impact of the annual festival upon the city of Logroño, Spain, as well as to consider how the city continues to evolve. Through installations, exhibitions, lectures, performances, workshops, and activities, Concéntrico proposes a reflection of the urban environment, welcoming architects and designers to intervene and challenge it while opening conversations about pressing matters.
While the official theme of the festival focused on the future of cities, the invited architects and designers took this suggestion further. Several overarching themes and subjects emerged during this year’s event, from the incorporation of concepts of time, an unusual element to be tacked through temporary installations, to the desire to engage more honestly with a wider public, to listen to their needs and create platforms where diverse perspectives can take center stage.
This edition also showcases how the festival itself changes and adapts over time, taking in feedback, learning from previous endeavors, and testing new formats. Since 2015, spanning the previous nine editions, the festival has realized over 120 urban installations, each hoping to help citizens reconnect with their city
Generating Playful Engagement
In the case of many architecture festivals, the ultimate desire is usually to engage with a wider public, to open up the practice of design, and to create something useful and attractive for everybody. This year, Concéntrico architects leaned into this. While many of the installations stem from complex questions related to the public realm, their final displays are simple, intuitive, and easy to interact with.
Perhaps if you want people to slow down and reflect upon their surroundings, a small water fountain with movable mirrors is all you need. A trampoline atop dazzlingly colored stairs can provide a change of perspective, especially if placed in front of an imposing cathedral, while twirling pieces of red fabric inspire people to explore an otherwise overlooked passage.
To encourage these playful interactions, the installations reward the curiosity of passers-by without requiring further explanations. However, if contemplated, hidden meanings and messages can emerge, adding depth to the otherwise straightforward intervention. One such example is Willem de Haan’s “Public Monument.” It transforms the pedestal of an imposing statue into a recognizable image: a modest house, complete with a porch, air-conditioning, and doorbell, all underneath the heroic stance of General Espartero. A small deck invites people to cross the water, pet the stone lions, and recreate domestic scenes in what was previously an authoritarian and inaccessible space. The layers of interpretation are multiple, from a commentary of private versus public ownership, the housing crisis, a challenge of the honorary status of statues in public spaces, or just a playful and campy intervention to raise eyebrows and invite further exploration.
Through interactions, some of the installations changed their appearance throughout the festival. ESD Madrid furnished the courtyard of the Biblioteca de La Rioja with a kit of parts, all cut out of plywood. The different pieces could be taken out of their boards and assembled into chairs, tables, or any other structure imagined by the users. The intuitive construction system captured the interest of both children and adults, all mingling to explore the formal possibilities of the parts. A similar approach was adopted by RaivioBumann, whose colorful pieces of urban furniture were moved and rearranged to create new visual and functional patterns in the square.
In addition to creating engagement through the final installations, some of the architects also invited participation during the design and build phases. Outpost Office brought a GPS-controlled painting robot to the courtyards of schools across Logroño as part of their Public Utilities initiative. They invited students to learn about the robot’s capabilities and contribute to the process of drawing new patterns onto the pavement, which can then serve as large-scale boards for games and competitions. Similarly, ji arquitectos + Blas Antón reached out to schools in the region, asking children to draw how they see the natural surroundings of the La Rioja region. The drawings were then transformed into wooden installations and scattered across the vineyard, overlapping the imagined and the real landscapes.
Shifting Perspectives
By yielding the drawing phase of the project to elementary school pupils, ji arquitectos + Blas Antón showcases a second emerging theme of this year’s edition: a willingness to welcome and accommodate different perspectives. The Open Segments installation demonstrates this potential of urban spaces to shift their identity and hint at other cultures. As the first Saudi architects to contribute to Concéntrico, Syn Architects offered the residents of Logroño a soft introduction to the spatial culture of the Najd region of Saudi Arabia. This is obtained by configuring the modular pavilion to recreate the fragmentation and intimacy that defines their native spatial configuration and social structure.
The pavilion also welcomes the Spanish influence. After the closing of the festival in Logroño, the modules will be disassembled and moved to Saudi Arabia, only this time to be reconfigured in a manner that showcases the Spanish culture of space, featuring more open areas for collective gatherings.
In a similar approach, Belgian architects Quentin Gérard, Guillaume Deman, Elisabeth Terrisse de Botton, and Matthieu Brasebin, considered the different conditions of Belgian and Spanish climates. Their installation, titled “Make It Rain,” leans from the Belgian experience of using water to control urban heat, but adapts it to the dry context of the Spanish region. They paved the patio of the La Rioja Museum with porous bricks and a pond with water taken from the local Ebro River. Should the temperatures rise in the sun-inundated patio, users can take a watering can and stray the water onto the bricks, its quick evaporation lowering the ambient temperature, thus creating a more comfortable and usable space.
On the Circularity of Time
One unexpected element for this edition was the contemplation of the element of time. KOSMOS’s Off-Season Pavilion highlights this concern by proposing an alternative to the temporary nature of festival interventions. Instead of building something from new materials, they reuse a locally and seasonally available material: large metal cages used for wine storage during the wine-production season, but left unused in the off-season. The temporary structure reimagines a basilica-like composition using these elements but allows for a complete disassembly and reutilization of the crates, thus demonstrating principles of circular design while also presenting an otherwise hidden element of local culture.
For this anniversary edition, Concéntrico launched a new provocation in the shape of a competition to answer the question: "How could a street evolve with a ten-year strategy?" Once again yielding control of the process of design, winner Daryan Knoblauch proposes an iterative approach, one which can adapt to the reactions it receives. The intervention aims to introduce an alien element into an urban park, challenging the passers-by to rethink their interactions with the space. This challenge is further emphasized through the various events organized in the space, including live performance shows that push the boundaries of typical behaviors in the public space. Through collaborations with sociologists and performance artists, the public reaction is documented, allowing it to inform future interventions and guide the 10-year-long process.
Instead of a complete top-down 10-year program, this winning proposal outlines a methodology for listening to local communities and searching for ways to amplify their message. The name of the project, Scenius 26003, demonstrates the same commitment. The word Scenius was coined by musician and producer Brian Eno to combine the concept of the lone ‘genius’ with that of their ‘scene’, or the collective intelligence of a group of people.
