Concéntrico, the large-scale laboratory for architecture, design, and urban experimentation, has officially inaugurated its six-day calendar of activities. The festival is transforming the Spanish city of Logroño from June 18 to 23, 2026, with a series of collective, festive, and performative practices in public space. The program includes 24 installations by international practices and creators, distributed across squares, vacant plots, streets, bridges, and emblematic spaces throughout the city. The urban interventions range from a circus designed by Smiljan Radić to street sound recordings for a vinyl album of the festival by Sounds of Architecture Records, also featuring three winning proposals from its international call for entries.
Logroño is a city of 150,000 inhabitants in northern Spain. Its origins date back a thousand years, shaped during the European Middle Ages by two key urban facts: it was crossed by the Camino de Santiago and served as a border settlement between the kingdoms of Castile and Navarre. The city's center has developed mainly around the Ebro River, in a mostly low-lying area with a few nearby hills, such as Cerro de Cantabria, Cerro del Corvo, Monte de la Pila, and the city's highest point, Pico Candorras. This history, landscape, and the traditions that have grown out of them are reflected in the projects proposed by the festival organization and participants.
In addition to the urban installations announced in May, the organization has prepared a detailed calendar of activities for this year. Structures, events, and workshops follow the festival's three thematic areas: Identity and Fiction, Urban Ecologies, and Ephemeral Agents. Workshops, music, theater, talks, and public events put these concepts up for discussion, in collaboration with local organizations active year-round in Logroño. As an urban laboratory, Concéntrico aims to be a space of encounter, learning, and collective urban participation, with all activities geared toward diverse audiences.
The result is a dense, walkable program that treats the whole city center as an exhibition space rather than confining architecture to galleries or talks. The twelfth edition opened with an inaugural walk through the festival's installations alongside their authors, and from there the days alternate between free-access installations scattered across plazas, gardens, and streets (Gran Vía–San Antón, Plaza de Santiago, Parque Gallarza, Plaza San Bartolomé) and a steady rhythm of daily guided group tours that allow visitors to move through the work with context rather than alone.
This year's program is particularly participatory and discursive. Workshops on disability and urban design with Ignacio G. Galán and CERMI La Rioja, a reimagined sport installation by Gabriel Fontana running across multiple sessions, collective garden plantings tied to urban biodiversity, and conversations with practicing architects such as the Boltshauser & Garbizu Collar team on their rammed-earth Terroir pavilion, or Smiljan Radić discussing his Circo structure, give the festival a strong undercurrent of architecture as social practice and architecture as pedagogy.
The latter half of the week layers in cultural and civic programming that frames the installations within Logroño's traditional calendar: Fiesta de la Música concerts, an intercultural parade staged around Matilde Cassani Studio's intervention, La Rioja Orgullo's street performance, and a closing Architecture for Ritual event tied to the traditional Hoguera de San Juan bonfires. Nighttime and sound-based works, Rádio Jardim, Sounds of Architecture x Concéntrico, and the overnight "Un Tercio de Vida" pavilion sessions, push the program past daytime touring into more immersive, time-based territory. The public presentation of the follow-up event, Summer School Concéntrico × Distigmo, closes the week of this working laboratory, where temporary structures, performance, food, music, and pedagogy are paired with architectural practice.
Similar interventions and installations around the world have drawn attention this year to contemporary issues in architecture and urban planning. The recently opened Limbo Museum in Accra, Ghana, inaugurated a two-part architectural installation by TAELON7 on March 12. The modular, lightweight structure engages in dialogue with the formerly abandoned Brutalist building that houses the museum. Berlin-based non-profit organization Bauhaus Earth developed BaleBio, a bamboo pavilion transforming a disused car park into an open community meeting space, offering a counterpoint to Bali's tourism-driven coastal development. Most recently, eight national pavilions at the 2026 Venice Art Biennale invite reflection on the built environment and contemporary living, bringing together artworks that foreground craftsmanship, explore unconventional materials, and test the boundaries of new technologies.
