An urban sauna in full Gran Vía; A boxing ring in the San Blas or 111 street lamps in the middle of the town hall square. These are some of the 24 interventions that make up the, which until June 24 invites you to rethink about the future of cities.
A contest that began in 2015 by the hand of the “this year meets its eleventh edition after having hosted more than 150 proposals – and since then it is raised as an opportunity to share with the public different reflections on. On this occasion, the festival stops in four conductive axes: food, weather, water and social processes.
“There are many opportunities to approach concentric,” acknowledges its director Javier Peña. “We can rediscover buildings that are part of the history of Logroño, but also travel their places with these proposals that have a common point and bring a more comfortable environment to citizens,” he adds.
An example of this is the. If in the last edition the pedestal of the equestrian statue of Baldomero Espartero housed a house for sale, this year the source at its feet has become a pool, where the public can even take a small dip. An annular wooden structure, painted blue, to deal with the suffocating summer and the climatic emergency. “We invite citizens to enter and cover the interior as if it were a pool and cool off,” says Pablo Sequero, one of the members of the
Water is also the protagonist of the great urban sauna in which the fountain of the Plaza Salon has become in La Gran Vía thanks to the work of, a kind of spa in the middle of the bustling traffic of the city center.
Another proposal of the 16 teams of architects of Europe, America and Asia that participate in this edition of Concentric invites to travel to the Ebro. There, next to a concrete jetty, a wooden structure has been raised, with white fabrics, which encourages to approach the riverbank of the river on the boundary between the urban and nature. “It is a little used space and this proposal with shadow and banks to sit has allowed us to know the response of the people, which says that something so unique was needed in the middle of the city,” says Sebastián Erazo, one of the authors of ‘Inhabiting the river’.
And not far from this intervention, in full, you can enjoy ‘all lines are discontinuous’. Andreia García and Diogo Aguilar have looked for a game through a maze of panels with the shadows and green as protagonists. “We want people to look at the beauty of simple things, such as this city park, a refuge,” concludes Aguilar.
Recycling is another of the concepts present in concentric. The project ‘111 lamps’, by Bayona Studio, has employed more than a hundred discarded street lamps – were replaced to achieve greater efficiency and energy savings – to give rise to a forest made up of some scaffolding in which the street lamps simulate the treetops. The place chosen for this intervention is the Town Hall Square, a building also projected by another prestigious architect, Rafael Moneo.
Participation is also invited to create a community garden in an empty lot of San Roque Street or rest on the hay bed conditioned in the Plaza de San Bartolomé. Ephemeral interventions. 24 in total. None of them will remain, but they may be the origin of future projects to bring the city closer to its inhabitants.
