What if a dinner table could become a boxing ring? A roundabout, a public bath? Or a vacant lot, a planetary garden? These were everyday realities in Logroño, Spain, recently, when the city became a living laboratory for radical imagination. Marking its 10th anniversary, Concéntrico: International Festival of Architecture and Design, hosted 23 spatial and urban interventions that redefined public space through acts of play, protest, memory and community. From 19 to 24 June 2025, streets, plazas, and forgotten lots across the city were re-scripted into living, breathing dialogues between architecture, people and nature.

Since its founding in 2015 by Concéntrico, an urban innovation laboratory that proposes new collective uses of public space, the festival is dedicated has evolved into an influential platform for experimental urbanism. Though deeply rooted in Logroño, where narrow streets and open plazas serve as living laboratories, Concéntrico has also activated public spaces beyond Spain, staging site-specific works in cities such as Milan, Bucharest, Barcelona, Dammam and Madrid. These extensions, rooted in their ethos and global in expression, reinterpret the festival’s mission in different cultural and spatial conditions. Back in Logroño, past editions have seen a former tobacco warehouse transformed into a sculptural social hub and a simple car park recast as a public amphitheatre; reminders that even modest spaces hold transformative potential. 

The 2025 edition revolved around four thematic axes: Food, Climate, Water and Social processes and rituals. Each theme addressed the city’s relationship to everyday life and global challenges plaguing our collective habitat. Water became a metaphor for resilience, with urban interventions transforming fountains, roundabouts and riverbanks. Food became a tool for togetherness, a gesture of collective reimagining through communal meals and market traditions. Climate was addressed through ecological materials and low-impact construction and also for reconsideration of shade, shelter and thermal comfort in public space. Social rituals took the form of new kinds of gatherings and urban routines, as a field of possibility for more inclusive, shared futures.

As festival director Javier Peña puts it in an official press statement, “This edition has marked a shift in many of the approaches and concepts we’ve developed over a decade of the festival. Citizens, more than ever, have embraced the project and made us reconsider the future of these spaces. It’s not only about architecture or physical transformation; social transformation is fundamental to the project.” This evolution reflected in a defining gesture for the first time as three large-scale installations were chosen to remain permanently in the city, marking a bold step for a design festival long known for its ephemerality.

One such project is The Battle of the Planetary Gardener by Borneo, a design and architecture studio originally based in Bogotá, Colombia, which took over a vacant lot on San Roque Street in La Villanueva. Here, visitors became gardeners, sowing seeds that would grow over time into a wild, participatory green space. Developed with the city’s Equality Department and various social organisations, it invited the community to care for a shared patch of land and, by extension, each other.

Nearby on Baños Street, Picos by Dutch designer Chris Kabel, presented a set of tetrahedral birdhouses built with just four planks. The elegant structures offer habitat to urban birds and align with Logroño’s sustainable city goals. Small in scale but expansive in intent, the project is a reminder that design can extend hospitality beyond the human discourse.

The third permanent intervention, A Third of life by Suomi-Koivisto, a Finnish architecture and design practice and the artist duo IC-98 occupies a lot owned by the COAR Foundation on Marqués de San Nicolás Street. Drawing from surrealist imagery and ancient healing practices, the pavilion conceals a secret garden, offering a place of quiet reflection and symbolic regeneration. In a time of climate anxiety, it’s both sanctuary and provocation.

Speaking with STIR on what cities still tend to overlook in their response to creative urban activations, Pena adds, “Often, politicians, due to their lack of sensitivity and electoral rhetoric, resolve creative or cultural matters without allowing projects to take root and spark conversation. That’s crucial, because only then can questions mature, leading to more complex outcomes.”

This push for long-term engagement over short-term spectacle was visible throughout the festival. Many interventions offered not just visual interest but also layered provocations. At the Mercado de Abastos, The Boxing Dinner by Zyva Studio, a French multidisciplinary collective known for blending performance, architecture and social commentary reimagined family meals as theatrical combat, placing a dining table in the centre of a circular arena. Borrowing visual cues from ancient Greek agoras and MMA rings, the installation explored the emotional weight of daily domestic rituals.

Elsewhere, tying water with the discourse, Monumental Splash by SalazarSequeroMedina, a Spanish design and research collective exploring the intersection of public space, ecology and social interaction, transformed the Espartero fountain into a whimsical urban pool made of recycled scaffolding, while Round about baths by Geneva-based firm Leopold Banchini Architects embedded public bathing facilities into a busy traffic loop, challenging how urban space is prioritised and who it serves.

Logroño’s relationship with its agricultural roots surfaced in works such as Ser Miento by Lemonot (Sabrina Morreale and Lorenzo Perri) and O-SH, which stacked 1200 vine shoots into a sculptural installation filled with the scent of winemaking, as an ode to the region’s viticultural identity. Crop Top by Chicago and Los Angeles-based design studio BairBalliet transformed the modest Plaza Cofradía del Vino in La Villanueva through a minimalist intervention that offered shelter and protection. The architectural form redefined the space as an intimate, welcoming place, inviting visitors to pause and momentarily inhabit the environment.

The festival also spoke to children in playful and tactile ways. Wild Creatures by Nami Nami Studio, a Spanish design practice focused on creating imaginative, participatory environments for children, turned the COAR courtyard, located in the heart of Logroño’s old town into a natural play zone filled with pine cones and soil. On the other hand, Dancing bench by Soft Baroque at the Carmen Park invited kinetic engagement through optical illusions and unusual seating angles.

From Heretics by Traumnovelle; an invitation to collective memory and healing in the Soto del Ebro, to Recycling Ecology by Abad, which transformed everyday infrastructure into multispecies sanctuaries, each project puts forth a poignant enquiry: how can public space do more than just function? How can it feel?

When asked how Concéntrico’s relationship with ‘temporariness’ has evolved, Javier Peña observes, “I see it entirely as a form of freedom. The project has built itself without being commissioned and with an evolving nature that has made it flexible, adaptive and consistent with the answers it has found over time.” This nimble, self-directed spirit continues to be Concéntrico’s greatest strength. Yet as the festival continues experimenting with permanence through initiatives like the Urban Climate Island project which transforms underused public areas into shaded, biodiverse microclimates or its recently preserved installations, it’s also grappling with how design can scale responsibly.

Peña has long believed that public space should not be treated as an afterthought or playground for token gestures. He notes, speaking with STIR, that creativity in cities is too often reduced to murals or beautification, without deeper engagement. “A project that is generated collectively,” he shares, “leads to empathy and a common good that goes beyond the value of the piece itself. It creates an appealing sense of ambiguous ownership, especially in these highly individualistic times.” This belief ties itself with multiple participatory works, such as Design Your Own Community Garden by artist and spatial designer Sahra Hersi; a workshop inviting people of all ages to draw imagined gardens filled with birds, insects, edible plants and spaces for gathering, and Earth Cooking by JMBAD (Joseph Melka + Balthazar Auguste - Dormeuil) which presented a performative, cyclical gathering where meals and materials return to the soil.

Looking ahead, Peña suggests that designers must ask more urgent questions, particularly reflecting on how cities can adapt to climate realities. He believes that in the next decade, the climate-responsive design of public spaces will become essential and that we must prepare now, through practice, empathy and bold re-scaling of what urban life can be. For now, the architecture festival continues to lead that charge not just through what it builds, but through what it dares to ask.