A guide to Concéntrico 2026, the world’s biggest small architecture festival

Concéntrico 2026 is opening its doors from 18-23 June, and the northern Spanish city of Logroño is in fervent preparation. Now in its 12th iteration, the architecture festival remains relatively small by some metrics – typically comprising about 20-25 lifesize installations each year within a place of just 150,000 inhabitants – but its immersive, city-wide nature has attracted rich responses from global, emerging and established studios alike.

Founded by architect Javier Peña Ibañez, who serves as its director – and supreme driving force – this is an event conceived, at its core, to celebrate participation and urban space. Its mission? To bring architecture out of its bubble, into the city, and invite all its residents to engage with it as part of their daily life. It draws big names, too, with MVRDV, Konstantin Grcic and Studio Ossidiana having taken part in past editions.

Concéntrico 2026: who, what, where

For Concéntrico 2026, 32 participants will create 24 installations. These will be, as in past years, spread across the city of Logroño, built on public sites, available for all to engage with – intentionally or casually, as part of the city's daily life. Participants include 2026 Pritzker Prize winner Smiljan Radić Clarke, AAU Anastas, 2050+, Taelon7, Future Firm, DF DC and PPAA. The festival will run 18-23 June 2026.

Curious to learn more? We spoke to Javier Peña Ibañez to delve into the details and help you navigate the world's biggest small architecture festival.

Concéntrico: history and mission

Wallpaper*: What is Concéntrico?

Javier Peña Ibañez: Concéntrico is an international festival of architecture and design founded in Logroño in 2015. From the beginning, I was interested in participation and in discovering alternative forms of urban spatial practice that could connect cities more closely to the people who live in them. At that time, I was already working independently through installations and temporary projects in public space, but I felt there were many architects, artists and designers exploring similar questions without really having a shared platform for dialogue.

I also found it surprising that cities were full of festivals dedicated to music, theatre, cinema or literature, while architecture – something everyone experiences every day – often remained confined to professional circles. Concéntrico emerged from the desire to make architecture accessible again, not as an abstract discipline but as something real, physical and collective.

One thing that still defines the festival today is that everything happens at a 1:1 scale. There are no models or speculative renderings; the projects are built directly in the city. People can enter them, touch them, play with them, ignore them or completely reinvent how they are used. That direct encounter changes the relationship people have not only with architecture, but with the city itself.

Concéntrico's evolution

W*: How has Concéntrico changed over the years, from its first iteration to the celebration it is today?

JP-I: The first editions were much smaller and more intuitive. We mainly worked in courtyards and small spaces in the historic centre of Logroño, trying to reveal hidden urban qualities or overlooked heritage. But very quickly we realised that if we wanted to change the way people related to public space, we also had to work where everyday life was actually happening.

That shift changed the festival enormously. Over the years we moved into parks, peripheral neighbourhoods, parking lots, riverbanks, vineyards and large public squares. We started working not only with architecture as an object, but with architecture as a way of producing encounters, conversations and new uses for familiar places.

At the same time, the themes became broader. Concéntrico today includes climate adaptation, sound, performance, accessibility, collective rituals, educational programmes and long-term urban processes. Some installations disappear after a week, but others leave traces behind: a new use, a new name, a memory or even the beginning of a permanent transformation. That tension between temporary action and long-term impact has become fundamental to the festival.

Over the years, Concéntrico has also made us understand that the street is not simply a transit space or an urban backdrop. It is a place of learning. It is where people negotiate how to live together, where identities are performed, where rituals emerge, where conflict becomes visible and where forms of belonging are constantly constructed and contested.

Public space is political not only because demonstrations happen there, but because everyday life happens there. Children learn how to relate to others there. Communities recognise themselves there. Differences become visible there. Architecture, in that sense, is never neutral. Even temporary interventions can alter the atmosphere of a place, the way people move through it, or the kinds of encounters that become possible within it.

Highlights over the years

W*: Could you pick some highlights from past festivals for us?

JP-I: I usually remember projects less as isolated objects and more as situations that changed how people occupied the city. One project that I often return to is Pabellón 1973–2021 by Lanza Atelier [the architects behind the 2026 Serpentine Pavilion in London]. It transformed Rafael Moneo’s town hall square through an experimental use of curved brickwork, creating a temporary civic structure that completely altered the perception of one of Logroño’s most recognisable urban spaces. It demonstrated how a familiar material could be used in a completely unexpected way.

Another project I often think about is Types of Spaces by Palma and Hanghar. Installed in the passage of the former tobacco factory of La Rioja, the intervention reconstructed the emptiness of the site through a sequence of brick rooms open to the sky. What was interesting was not only the architecture itself, but the way it altered the scale and atmosphere of public space.

The project introduced domestic proportions into an urban passageway, allowing visitors to inhabit the installation rather than simply cross it. Water mist, crushed brick flooring and the mass of the ceramic walls transformed movement through the space into something slower and more intimate. It explored how architecture can completely change the emotional reading of a place using very elemental means: brick, proportion, repetition and atmosphere.

I would also highlight The Garden of Intersections by Studio Ossidiana, which transformed an overlooked urban site into a landscape of encounters between people, plants and non-human forms of life. It was one of those projects that expanded our understanding of what architecture can be: less an object and more an ecology of relationships.

For me, these projects are important because they show that temporary architecture can create lasting shifts in perception. Sometimes the installation disappears completely, but the way people understand a place never returns to what it was before.

Concéntrico 2026: theme and more

W*: Let’s move to this year. What’s in store for this year’s festival?

JP-I: This year’s edition is structured around three curatorial lines: Identity and Fiction, Urban Ecologies and Ephemeral Agents.

Identity and Fiction emerged from a question that has accompanied the festival for years: how do we build a sense of belonging? Cities are full of inherited symbols, rituals and narratives that shape how we understand ourselves collectively. The projects in this section look at temporary architecture as a way of producing new stories, drawing from regional costumes, travelling circuses, celebrations, ceremonies and popular traditions. Rather than treating identity as something fixed, they understand it as something constantly performed, negotiated and reinvented.

Smiljan Radić Clarke’s Circo, for example, imagines a fragile travelling circus installed on soft ground in the historic centre of the city, recalling temporary architectures associated with itinerancy, gathering and spectacle. Matilde Cassani Studio’s project at the Arco de San Bernabé takes inspiration from the traditional regional costume of La Rioja, using textile references and ceremonial forms to explore the relationship between folklore, fiction and urban identity.

Urban Ecologies focuses on climate, landscape, material reuse, depaving and adaptation processes within the city. Ephemeral Agents looks at temporary architecture as a tool for activating social relations through sound, movement, accessibility and collective participation.

What feels different this year is the stronger emphasis on activation and collective experience. Many projects are not simply installations to look at, but situations that invite people to gather, listen, play, rest or participate together.

There is also a stronger ecological dimension running through the festival. We are not only talking about sustainability as a concept, but working directly with real urban processes: removing pavement to recover permeable ground, reusing infrastructures in disuse, creating climate shelters or working with discarded materials at an architectural scale.

2026 participants

W*: Who are some of the key participants for 2026?

JP-I: [As already noted] Smiljan Radić Clarke will present Circo, a temporary structure inspired by travelling circuses and fragile architectures of observation and gathering; [and] Matilde Cassani Studio is working with local textile traditions and rituals around the Arco de San Bernabé. AAU Anastas will present Cathedral for One, a stone structure conceived for a single visitor and activated through daily sound services with works by artists including Yara Asmar, Nicolas Jaar, Hania Rani and Mohammad Reza Mortazavi.

In the Urban Ecologies section, Sahra Hersi’s The Library Garden transforms a paved square next to the Rafael Azcona Library into a civic garden connected to depaving, seeds, care and climate adaptation. Parabase will reuse components from an electrical substation in Transtation, while noof group will develop a pilot project exploring shade, cooling and thermal comfort in public space.

We also have projects by raumlaborberlin, Boltshauser × Garbizu Collar, BEAR, Future Firm, DF DC, Gabriel Fontana and Amanda Pinatih, 2050+, TŁO and many others. The interesting thing is not only the names themselves, but the coexistence of very different ways of thinking about public space within the same urban framework.

This year's wildcard

W*: What’s the most unusual installation this year?

JP-I: Perhaps Circo by Smiljan Radić Clarke. What interests me is that it introduces uncertainty into the city. A circus is never entirely architecture, never entirely performance, never entirely public space. It belongs somewhere in between.

For one week, that ambiguity becomes part of the city. It creates a temporary condition, where fiction, gathering and urban life overlap.

AAU Anastas’ Cathedral for One would be another candidate, but for opposite reasons. While Circo is collective and extroverted, Cathedral for One is radically intimate. It is conceived for a single visitor and constructed entirely from recovered stone fragments. You enter alone into a stone structure activated through sound pieces by artists including Nicolas Jaar, Yara Asmar and Hania Rani. It feels suspended somewhere between architecture, ritual and listening space.

The Concéntrico legacy

W*: What are you hoping for visitors to take away from visiting the Concéntrico experience?

JP-I: I hope visitors leave with the feeling that cities are not fixed. Public space is often perceived as something already decided and already defined. Concéntrico tries to reopen that imagination.

The festival allows people to experience familiar places differently, even if only temporarily. A parking lot becomes a collective playground, a paved square becomes a garden, a courtyard becomes a listening chamber, a bridge becomes a social space. Once you experience that transformation physically, it becomes difficult to see the city as completely immutable again.

Many of the projects we develop are not only about spatial transformation, but about mediation. They create situations where people can recognise themselves differently, or recognise others differently. Through fiction, ritual, play, celebration or collective experience, architecture becomes a tool for imagining other forms of coexistence.

I think this is especially important today, because cities have become highly polarised environments where even very basic urban questions – mobility, climate, public space – are quickly absorbed into ideological conflict. In that context, architecture still has the capacity to produce shared experiences that escape fixed positions, even temporarily.

After 12 years, I increasingly see Concéntrico less as a series of installations and more as a cultural framework for reading the city differently. The projects are temporary, but what remains is often a shift in perception: the understanding that public space is mutable, and that the ways we inhabit it can also change.

Concéntrico 2026 runs 18-23 June 2026 in Logroño, Spain

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