The city of Logroño has opened its doors wide to Concéntrico, the International Festival of Architecture and Design, transforming its historic streets, plazas, waterfronts, and docks into an open-air canvas. Over six days, residents and visitors are invited to reimagine how public spaces can reflect collective values such as sustainability, community, climate resilience, and cultural memory . With creative teams from 16 countries collaborating across 24 installations, Concéntrico becomes not just an event but a living urban laboratory.
One of the event’s most talked-about installations is Monumental Splash, where the fountain beneath the statue of General Espartero has been reclaimed as a temporary public pool. Designed to address rising temperatures and urban heat islands, this participatory intervention uses low-cost, reusable materials and invites people of all ages to wade, linger, and share conversation around the monument. It’s a simple act—turning water into shared public memory—but one that speaks volumes about urban inclusivity.
Another standout is the Roundabout Baths, a pop-up sauna erected on Gran Vía. Commissioned from Swiss firm Leopold Banchini Architects, this structure revives dormant public infrastructure by transforming it into a communal wellness space. Visitors follow a path of steam and cold-water pools, engaging in ritualistic encounters and forging new connections in unexpected corners of the city . For locals like Marta—who attended with her teenage son—stumbling into a steam room in downtown Logroño reminded her of mountain hot springs she visited as a child. This kind of rooted memory creates emotional depth behind each intervention.
Beyond water-focused works, several installations invite users to rethink everyday public amenities. In Plaza del Ayuntamiento, 111 Farolas by Bayona Studio repurposes discarded lamp posts to form an ephemeral “forest” of light. Strolling through it after dusk, young couples and seniors alike pause to trace patterns of shadow and silhouette, carried out by riffling breezes and gentle laughter. It’s a poetic reminder that lighting can reshape mood, safety, and rhythm in public space .
Then there’s Earth Cooking, located in a vineyard outside the city—a land art installation that invites communal gathering around climate-conscious food preparation. People knead bread in outdoor ovens, stir pots over open fires, and share silence until someone begins playing guitar. The evening becomes a tapestry of ceremony and conversation, bridging urban lives with rural traditions through the simple act of cooking together .
The spirit of concéntrico lies in participation and education. According to the festival organizers, more than 40 activities—workshops, guided tours, roundtables—run parallel to the installations, many focused on themes like collective food practices, water as cultural resource, climate adaptation, and social rituals. Families attend hands-on sessions that invite them to design their own community gardens or dream up urban furniture that responds to emotional needs. In one workshop, a group of retirees sketched prototypes for benches that could double as bug hotels—tiny moments of caring embedded in public design.
Concéntrico’s educational impact extends well beyond the festival week. Over the past year, it has held competitions and education programs across Spain—Milán, Bucarest, Madrid, Dammam, and more—turning it into a platform for innovation and urban sustainability . Logroño becomes their culmination and showcase, the moment when ideas crystallize into lived experience. Schools bring students to walk the installations and learn how architecture becomes social glue rather than isolated objects.
Over 300 proposals from 44 countries were reviewed by juries at La Rioja’s architectural college, leading to four winners who built their installations using locally sourced Garnica wood, reflecting sustainability and participatory design. This transparent process gives meaningful roots to each intervention, anchoring them in local material culture and ecological consciousness.
Long-term ambition also shows through permanent installations—younger citizens might wake up years later to find the Isla Climática in Parque Felipe VI, a shaded grove conceived during last year’s calls. These permanent pieces act as enduring cultu ral anchors that bear both participatory lineage and ecological function.
The festival’s design emphasizes circular design, material reuse, and climate resilience. For example, Monumental Splash is built from modular recycled plastics, cloth, and donates its materials to schools after dismantling. Roundabout Baths reclaims an unused bus shelter and retrofits it with wood and insulation. Bayona studio’s farolas reclaim discarded infrastructure as both sculptural and practical elements. This approach resonates deeply in an era marked by cravings for sustainable and equitable urban initiatives.
Local businesses feel the pulse. Cafés near Paseo del Espolón report that families, students, and professionals skip inside between installations. Taxis are booked for weekend rounds. Informal tours emerge—grandparents walking grandkids from site to site, uncovering Logroño’s history newly told through interventions. Resident Josué, who lives next to Plaza del Ebro, said he hadn’t met half his neighbors till he bumped into them while exploring Todas las líneas son discontinuas, a poetic walkway created in Parque del Ebro by Andreia García + Diogo Aguilar Studio. Everything about it—its curves, its textures—encouraged unplanned interactions and stories.
Concéntrico’s global and local scale positions it within key architecture and design trends—urban transformation, public space innovation, participatory urban design, eco-friendly architecture, and place-making strategies. Yet its impact lies in emotional texture, in lighting up public spaces with humor, safety, discovery, and possibility. It encourages cities to be reinvented by their dwellers, through design that speaks to personal memory as well as global urgency.
By turning the city into a living laboratory, Concéntrico invites participants to treat Logroño’s urban fabric not as a finished product, but as a work-in-progress. That experimental spirit results in moments like toddlers splashing feet in Espartero’s pool, teens writing chalk messages on wooden benches, senior groups drifting between aromas of bread and vines, or the silence of someone simply absorbing light filtered through recycled lamp-post "trees."
Those moments are fleeting, but vital. They remind us that public space lives or dies not by convention, but by interaction. Concéntrico’s 24 interventions do more than occupy plazas—they invite longing, action, and ownership. And long after installations leave, their ripples linger—in new infrastructure, in community routines, and in imaginations already dreaming the next chapter for a city that just learned it could invent itself again amid its history and traditions.