For ten years, the international Concéntrico festival in Logroño, Spain has been reimagining cities as living laboratories for architectural and urban experimentation. As urban environments worldwide become increasingly regulated and sanitized, this groundbreaking festival has emerged as a vital counterbalance, testing alternative futures through temporary installations that provoke dialogue about what cities could offer their communities.
The festival has reached a significant milestone with the upcoming publication of "Concéntrico: Urban Innovation Laboratory," a comprehensive book surveying a decade of urban design and collective transformation. Edited by festival director Javier Peña and Nick Axel, the publication analyzes 86 key projects from over 150 interventions created during the festival's first decade. The book launch will be accompanied by an international tour designed to share insights on collective transformation and design with global audiences.
"The book is a unique reflection on the transformation of cities and the relevance of architecture and design in the 21st century," explains Javier Peña. "It brings together proposals that allow us to engage in the most pressing urban debates based on Concéntrico's experience over the last decade." The publication is structured around seven urgent themes including identity, heritage, collectivity, ecology, play, and domesticity, offering critical perspectives for anyone interested in reimagining collective urban spaces.
One of the festival's primary achievements has been bridging the gap between conceptual architectural rigor and everyday urban life. Rather than simplifying complex ideas, Concéntrico translates them into tangible experiences accessible to all citizens. "Our starting point is not to simplify ideas, but to translate them into tangible experiences that anyone can live," Peña notes. "What matters is that the installation can be used and traversed, that it generates real situations in urban space, regardless of whether the public knows the theoretical background of the project or not."
This approach creates what Peña calls a "double reading" - maintaining the critical layer that opens debates within the architectural discipline while offering immediate, direct experiences that connect with citizens. The curatorial work involves accompanying design teams to ensure their projects maintain conceptual depth while providing urban experiences that are both accessible and meaningful to the broader community.
The festival operates with remarkable flexibility, treating each edition as an intensive process that begins with curating participating teams and continues through hands-on collaboration. "Every year is an intense undertaking," Peña explains. "We try to explore new sites, working with the idea that the whole city is available, and we collaborate in a very hands-on way with every participant so their ideas can find the best possible context." This approach focuses on creating the right "match" between project and place to draw out the full potential of site-specific interventions.
Once installations are built, the festival relies on civic respect from the community. Despite occupying central squares with no night surveillance, the works are carefully maintained by the public themselves. This respect has become one of Concéntrico's defining characteristics. Over more than 150 interventions, unexpected events have always occurred, from weather challenges to environmental changes due to climate change, requiring constant adaptation and quick responses from local teams.
The festival has successfully balanced risk and provocation with responsibility for safety and social acceptance. "We accept that experimentation always entails risk, but we see it as an essential part of the process," Peña states. "Our challenge is to find the space where provocation and responsibility can coexist." The festival works with architects, municipal technicians, and local fabricators to ensure safety and accessibility while maintaining the critical character of projects.
Often, negotiations with regulations open unexpected creative paths, forcing teams to rethink materials, structures, or assembly processes while keeping the experimental essence alive. Each project functions as a dialogue between organizers and the public who experience the installations. This ongoing conversation has built community engagement that allows the festival to take greater risks and explore new possibilities with each edition.
A decade of curating Concéntrico has fundamentally transformed Peña's understanding of architecture itself. "When I started, my perspective was more focused on the object, on the finished form," he reflects. "Through the festival, I have learned that what matters most is not the result but the process: how projects are conceived, negotiated, built, and lived." This shift emphasizes collaborative work between invited teams, institutions, technicians, carpenters, and citizens who inhabit the installations.
Temporality has become central to the festival's philosophy. The ephemeral nature is not seen as a limitation but as a critical tool that allows rapid testing of ideas, provoking reactions, learning from successes and failures, and leaving traces in the city's collective memory. This approach has changed perceptions of architecture from being tied to permanence toward generating meaningful moments that transform relationships with urban environments.
Several installations from the past decade have created lasting memories that demonstrate how temporary interventions can leave permanent marks on cities and their inhabitants. Lanza Atelier's intervention in the Town Hall square, featuring more than 24,000 bricks forming circles of 40, 30, and 20 meters in diameter, created a symbolic dialogue with Rafael Moneo's building while transforming how people used and accessed the vast square.
Other memorable moments include Rindeluxe by Plastique Fantastique, a large inflatable ring that transformed the entrance to Calle Portales and brought usually hidden courtyards into the city's foreground. Willem de Haan's intervention reinvented the equestrian monument to Espartero by placing a house on its pedestal, creating a critical gesture that altered how people perceived an urban icon and encouraged new interactions with the surrounding space.
More recently, Leopold Banchini surprised audiences with temporary baths installed in the large roundabout of Gran Vía, a radical and playful intervention that completely transformed perception of a traffic space, turning it into a place to pause, inhabit, and enjoy. These episodes demonstrate how temporary installations create enduring memories and collectively shared experiences.
Looking toward the future, Concéntrico stands at a pivotal moment as it evolves beyond its celebrated ephemeral model. The festival's next major experiment involves translating the agile, innovative spirit of temporary installations into projects with greater continuity. "The book arrives at a key moment because it closes one decade and opens another," Peña explains. "Until now, Concéntrico has been a laboratory of ephemeral experimentation, and the next step is to extend that logic toward projects with greater continuity."
Current initiatives include the Urban Climate Island project, which brings the festival's spirit into permanent infrastructures while exploring how lessons from temporary interventions can scale into long-term urban transformation. The festival also aims to consolidate as a platform for collaboration between cultural institutions, municipalities, universities, and private partners, demonstrating that such alliances can influence urban policies and collective understanding of public space.
The upcoming international book tour represents part of this broader ambition to share reflections globally and explore how they resonate in different contexts with various stakeholders. As cities worldwide grapple with over-regulation and sanitization, Concéntrico's decade of experimentation offers a compelling model for maintaining urban vitality through thoughtful, community-engaged design interventions that celebrate the unscripted moments of connection and discovery that make cities truly livable.
