Books
Ten Years of Concéntrico
This publication revisits ten years of architectural and urban experimentation in Logroño, whose festival Concéntrico has put La Rioja’s capital on the map of contemporary debate. Instead of just documenting the 150+ projects exhibited, the book is a choral manifesto on how architecture and design can test alternative ways of inhabiting cities. What’s offered is less an exhaustive chronology than a constellation of gestures, works, and reflections that show the experimental ambition of an event where temporary becomes a tool for transformation.
An extensive dialogue between Javier Peña Ibáñez and Nick Axel kicks off the book. It serves as an intellectual compass: their reflections set the attitude with which the projects should be read, reminding that Concéntrico started out as an experiment, not a consolidated event. The decision to arrange the works by theme, not years, seems right, considering that the festival’s evolution is measured not in a timeline but by its capacity to address current urban tensions.
The visual takes priority: the photographs, plans, and diagrams keep the freshness of the ephemeral. Concéntrico is an open-air school, a reminder that rethinking the city is a task for all. If architecture is measured by its ability to create urban narratives, the book confirms that the festival has managed to build one of its own; a narrative that makes the ephemeral lasting, the local global, and the experimental a shared lesson. A work which rather than documenting, is an invitation to imagine the city as a living laboratory.
