Concéntrico: Urban Innovation Laboratory

Celebrates ten years of projects commissioned for the Concéntrico festival of design and architecture in Logroño, Spain.

Concéntrico: Urban Innovation Laboratory reflects on the first decade of the international Concéntrico festival and the one hundred and fifty projects and designs commissioned for it. The festival’s aim is to serve as a laboratory searching for creative ways of using architecture and design to strengthen communities and to support the dialogue between designers and citizens.

The book offers a unique meditation on the transformation of cities and the relevance of architecture and design in the twenty-first century. It introduces meaningful ways to address and engage with pressing urban issues--from identity and heritage to temporariness, collectivity, ecology, play, and domesticity--through the lens of selected Concéntrico commissions since 2015. Through lavishly illustrated essays, it features projects by eighty artists, architects, and designers from twenty countries. They are prefaced and held together by a conversation between the editors Javier Peña Ibáñez and Nick Axel, who speak about the festival’s context, evolution, and the knowledge it has produced since 2014.

Javier Peña Ibáñez is a Spanish architect based in Madrid working as a curator, educator, researcher, educator, and consultant. He is founder and director of Concéntrico, the international festival of design and architecture in Logroño, Spain. Nick Axel is an architect, editor, educator, and curator. He is deputy editor of e-flux Architecture and head of the architectural design department at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam.