SHUMI BOSE/KOOZMiles, Javier, thank you for joining me. There’s a parallel in your respective practices, which I’ll attempt to set out briefly. At Concéntrico, curated by Javier, a certain transformation of the city takes place during the festival, while Miles' studio and teaching explores the urban phenomenon the parade, and the action of claiming – however temporarily – civic space. The activation of the public realm is the intersection we’ll discuss today, but perhaps you can introduce yourselves nonetheless –

MILES GERTLERYes, sure. I'm the co-director of Common Accounts, which I run between Toronto and Madrid with my collaborator, Igor Bragado. I also teach as an assistant professor at the University of Toronto, at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design — and it's there where, for the past few years, I’ve been running a studio on ephemeral architectures and parades called ‘Rehearsing the Parade’. The studio builds on the interests of our work at Common Accounts, on pragmatic tools for city building that deal in ritual performance and theatre. It really emerged from our interest in rituals of death and funeral processions; that’s where we first encountered this rich history of parades and mobile events that were animators of the urban realm. This is one of the contexts in which our practice inquires inside of academia; Igor teaches at IE University in Madrid, while I teach in Toronto. And yeah, that's me.

JAVIER PEÑA IBAÑEZWell, I'm an architect based in Madrid, where I moved twenty years ago from Logroño, the city where I was born. I am always interested to understand how people are related with their environment; how you divide the idea of public and private, from your home to public space. From this perspective, I started making some work in civic spaces — sometimes more performative projects. I quickly understood that for the research I wanted to do, it was better not to author the projects myself: I needed different perspectives. The community of a city is really broad and if you want to connect with a large, diverse audience, you need to bring in ideas from different places. That was the goal of setting up Concéntrico. I started Concéntrico in 2015 as a research project emerging from my own work, and it was a good format to explore and invite people with different perspectives, sharing new ways to think about public space. And so it grew, over the next 10 years — we celebrate our tenth anniversary this year.

I'm also the art director of TAC! Urban Architecture Festival — for the Spanish Ministry of Housing Arquia Foundation — which hops from one city to another each year; this year’s edition is in Alicante and the Canary Islands in October. We run a competition, through which young architects design a big pavilion — it's a way to connect the actions of the Spanish government with local politics, in a way. We are able to explore experimental constructions, and consider how temporal events like this can form part of the cultural life of the place. I used to teach too — but I had to pause, as these activities prevent me from committing my time to academia.

KOOZI’ve never been to Logroño; is there something particular about that city’s public space that made you want to activate it — or was it an interest that came following your move from Logroño to Madrid?

JP–IMy idea came from the desire to establish a long-term project. This meant choosing a place where I have the capacity and the knowledge to do this properly. At the beginning, the name of the festival was simply numerical, like 01, 02, 03 — always thinking about what’s coming next — and suggesting that it's an ongoing process, not just a pop-up for a moment. So for that, we need to know the city and its scale. This is actually a strong point of Logroño; you can walk from the ancient part of the city, through a more natural landscape and reach the contemporary city in a couple of hours. That’s obviously not possible in a city like Madrid, where the terrain of the city remains similar across several areas. In Logroño it’s different, the way you can combine interests across a series of places and artworks or projects. You can talk about the Cathedral and about religion, memories, tradition; within fifteen minutes you can jump into the river. These factors are good for the project. Logroño is maybe a medium city for Spain but in the end, it’s a rather standard scale for European cities; many more people live in places like that than in the bigger metropolis.

MGJavier, it seems like there's a tradition of ephemeral events, like processions and parades that occupy and transform the public realm in Spain, in a way that doesn't really exist elsewhere — for instance, in North America. Were there existing festivals or traditions that Concéntrico leveraged or followed, in Logroño?

JP–IWell, there are many things like this — the London Design Festival or other events where people work with public spaces. Maybe the main difference is how we manage the money and the curatorial approach to the project. Of course, you need money to build things, so many similar events put the brands first; it works as a marketing event, which you can see across Europe through many expos and so on.

KOOZIf I'm interpreting Miles’ question correctly, it’s about traditions and rituals like Catholic Easter parades, or the Catalan festival of San Jordi. Were there any preexisting rituals that the city has held?

JP–IOver these last two years, I’ve been explaining the idea that the festival comes from the memories of the city. All cities have many ephemeral events that take place like an act of celebration or commemoration, to remember some moment in local history or tradition. You don't name that act as ephemeral; you go there and you are part of that place — it's about the way you feel part of a community, in some way. This idea has always been around for a long time.

I feel that the Concéntrico festival is so familiar for regular people because it's related to the way people are used to feeling part of a place. This kind of connection does not come from thinking about architectural aspects; it's the way you feel, best understood by going there than by considering its meaning, in a way. You are connecting this with this idea of being part of a celebration in the city..

This was a realisation that has come over time and thinking about what's ephemeral and what's not. At the end, are not all parties ephemeral? We don’t talk about the ephemeral party of San Bernabe, or whatever. When you celebrate something, you take the time you need: three days, five days, seven days. That’s the way we choose to communicate something, to allow people to be part of it in some way. So it’s something similar, and architecture can enable this kind of thing.

MGIt's amazing that such a cultural tradition or foundation exists, though. I’m imagining that it probably makes it a little bit easier at the beginning of organising an event like this, in terms of persuading public bodies that the public realm could be occupied in that way. I remember when Antoni Miralda, the Catalan artist, told us about his parade in Kansas City, as part of the actions for ‘Wheat and Steak’ in 1981. He said that it took two years just to meet all the people he had to meet, then another two years to produce the parade itself. And that was already working within the context of an existing annual agricultural parade; he just rewired and adapted it to something that was a little bit more experimental. But fundamentally, that was a four-year artistic effort, and that's always boggled my mind.

JP–IYes, this sort of process needs a lot of time; when you need to involve the community or take permissions… If you read about Christo and Jeanne-Claude, all their projects took many years to arrange. Even in public space, there are people or communities that try to make them somehow private; accessible, but without allowing you to do what you want. So building a kind of confidence takes time. Of course, we are now doing projects at Concéntrico that were not possible to do in the first year, because now they understand what we can offer. Public workers are more confident with us, and they allow us to do some things that may have been risky in the beginning. So time helps, in the way you build relations with people, with your audience; you t learn from them, and they from you, it becomes a dialogue. It's really good. Working with public or outdoors spaces — rather than inside a room or an institution like a museum — is somewhat difficult because the property line of such places are often not clear. When you work within these limits, not everybody wants to cooperate. So, this is part of the work in some way; it's a bit hidden, but when you are working on projects like this, you know that it’s maybe the most important part.

KOOZI’m sure that being familiar with the city and its machinery must be instrumental. Both of you have a conviction about the importance of making a cultural impact in the public realm — even disrupting it, in order to host these kinds of artistic, architectural, and political conversations.

JP–IMaybe at the beginning it was not so clear for me; it was the landscape I wanted to work with in some way, but maybe as research or to write a book. (Indeed, we have just produced a new book about Concéntrico’s activities, co-edited by Nick Axel) But I was focused on my ideas around public space. Also, 2015 was a totally different moment from today, so that now I feel that it's maybe even more relevant than when we started. The connection between people is more important and we need tools that help us to relate or be in contact with others. This kind of process that makes you suddenly be close to someone you would otherwise never know — it's more and more important nowadays.

KOOZMiles, jump in. How is it that Common Accounts remains convinced about acts of city-making in the public realm — from funereal origins to the parade?

MGOne of the brilliant people in our ‘studio bibliography’ is Matilde Cassani, the Italian architect and researcher. She's also been a guest lecturer in a series of talks that I organised for the studio, and she cites Palermo, for instance, as an example of a city where permanent changes were ushered in under the guise of supposed temporality. Things could happen that maybe otherwise would never have happened, and some of these ended up being permanent. And this reminds me a little bit of Koolhaas’ argument in Delirious New York — that certain things needed to be kept illicit or secret in order to kind of actually play their full effect forward and produce lasting changes for the city.

The temporality of parade events can similarly propose to be so much more radical and might actually stand a chance at materialising the improbable — even in a context like this — as a result of its temporary nature. Also bringing it into the classroom is really important, because the ways in which you can speculate with much more radically than might otherwise materialise — specifically in Toronto, to basically shape the parameters of an urban vision beyond those which are otherwise being developed here. Teaching at a school like U of T is amazing because it's a way of finding your own tribe in these brilliant students who work here, growing that niche intellectually and as a design group. This studio on parades has three cohorts of graduate students, thinking about not only the potential of ephemerality as a design tool, but also the story, persuasion and strategic thinking that underpins and supports this effort, really, because persuasion seems to be such a core part of design labour.

JP–IWell, I would love to invite Matilde to the next edition! She was part of a competition entry about the street that we took part in about a decade ago. She has always worked with similar ideas, even more than the physical objects. I wanted to add, as you were talking about teaching, that in my experience when I make briefs about public spaces, students get a bit lost. Working at the scale of the city is not on their agenda, and there are not so many references for doing something of this kind; it's a newer aspect of our work as architects.

Also cities are really complex, and public spaces are where things like the social problems and economical problems may be most visible. This kind of complexity is difficult to work with, because at the end, it’s not clear where the problem is coming from, right? There’s the economics of this country, there are issues with the city, or the impact of online shopping in your daily urban environment — all those things. How do you combine the need for people to have fun on the street drinking a beer, while other people want to sleep around the corner from this terrace? All those aspects are not easy, and that is what I learned from cities: you have to anticipate the changes happening. When something gets worse, it’s very complicated to change it quickly. Because of that, I think that it's always important to be careful, working not only with architectural or design tools but social ones — taking care that existing communities are not lost or separated from the places where they live, and addressing their problems. This is one of the things that I don’t know to teach within the course of a semester in school.

MGTotally. I don’t think our students could do the projects that we do, if we didn't have a full year to work on them; that's crucial. It's a question of familiarity and subject matter knowledge; it needs to be granular, it needs to be developed. One way that we try to accelerate that is really by trying to work in a journalistic mode. We've tried to adapt research methods from other disciplines like journalism, and we've had a few journalists come and share their approaches to storytelling and research with the students: Tomos Lewis, who writes for Monocle and the BBC and Daniela Porat, who has worked for ProPublica and the New York Times.

We propose the model of long-form journalism as the entry point; projects begin through a documentary lens, recording everything that's happening in the contexts of the students’ investigations. Of course, as soon as representation begins — the process of recording and documentation — they've already intervened in the world. It's already not neutral therefore design has already begun. Actually, that's a really important moment when students realise that they've already begun to intervene in these worlds; their own biases and frictions come into play, in a way that I think is actually super productive for the project.

My student, Emilie Tamtik, was researching the Ise Shrine and the rituals that stage the reconstruction of the shrine every 20 years. From those strategies, those tactics — as well as learning how towns and villages across Japan will send a representative each year, to bring blessings from the shrine back home — she developed the concept for a climate archive below Lake Huron, in a salt mine. Salt — which has long been a material for preservation — would form the environment where people in the future would go to receive a climate retroscope; a description of weather in a climate system from a day in the past — a system that would no longer be available due to climate change.

KOOZSo, taking a national-scale spatial practice or ritual from a particular context, and designing a framework for it within the context — including the future mythology — of Toronto.

MGYeah, that’s it. She realised through her research on the Ise Shrine, that the process was also a land and resource stewardship project. All of the lands from which the construction materials are gathered are either state-owned, or historically owned by the Imperial family, as the practice of Shinto was consolidated by the Imperial family in Japan. So there was an idea of reciprocity between the central political structure and broader ritual, but also the environmental context that is engaged with that particular structure. Emilie was seeking to create that same kind of mutualism below Lake Huron, between a specific environmental context and a future community that would have no other way of understanding what it had lost.

KOOZI just spent some time in a small coastal town in Europe, and it's true that there's certainly more mutual recognition and responsibility; there's also more homogeneity. There are certain limits to my access as an ‘outsider’. So again, for maybe slightly different reasons, this notion of reinforcing or even rekindling a public culture of encounter seems necessary. How do your students face today’s urgencies?

MGYou know, I guess it varies from case to case. When I'm engaging with students based on their project, I'm often thinking about a place where the idea of publicness — or even just like inhabiting the outdoors — is made more and more impossible due to heat and climate change. I'm thinking of students like Gian Lorenzo Giannone who had a concept to flood public piazzas in Italian cities — especially during the August holidays when they were otherwise hot, inhospitable, and vacant — so that maybe more people could kind of like remain, and the city could become more like a beach. He was able to dig back into myth and folkloric kinds of storytelling native to Italy, to identify strategies to animate the urban realm and transform the environment. In projects like that, the ‘enemy’ of public encounters is broader than any local force. Those are the kinds of big motivators that I see: these students, whether explicitly or implicitly, are often driven by an activist concern.

JP–IFor me, one of the more important things we do each year is adding contemporary layers of meaning to our cities; this is important. Most of the authors of projects in Concéntrico come from different places; together we work hard to create an understanding around the meaning of a place and how they can, in some way, reveal and augment the meaning of existing elements of the city.

This year we held the festival in June for the first time; we hoped for good weather and we had it. We made a lot of projects about water, about fountains, about the river — it was really nice to see how people wanted to be part of that. So by now people are waiting for us to make some changes to the city every year — we get requests from the mayors of other municipalities. There is the situation of climate refugees, where we have to make spaces that are protected from the weather; indoor places like libraries or museums, where you can put air conditioning. But this is not a way to live; we have to combine outdoor strategies to find ways that we can be together. This kind of healthy situation is a good thing to preserve. All these things must be considered in the way we address the future; I think more studios of architecture and design will work on these issues, because more cities will need that.

MGWell, let's talk about work, effort and labour. This is the paradox: it's so much work to produce these temporary architectures, perhaps no less work than to materialise something permanent or lasting — yet it's on an annual schedule. I understand that Logroño has a tradition of architectural culture; it's a city that has produced interesting architectural proposals. But Javier, you have probably produced more interventions in the history of Concéntrico, than any permanent new construction — there's a big impact that you've produced. Do people — like stakeholders, politicians or simply residents — request that these interventions become more lasting, or to make things permanent?

JP–IYes. Always, since the beginning. It was crazy; the mayor of the first edition felt that it was amazing and that we should preserve something; that’s been the same feedback each year. At the beginning, we actually tried to do it, but it was not easy — and that was not the point of the project. After this tenth edition, we are trying to launch a new competition to develop something permanent — with the cooperation of the municipality, because they were part of the initiative. We wanted to develop something that follows the rules, so that anything we build can be managed well after it is built. It's good for us too, as we tend to avoid certain bureaucracies. The way you design as a technician from the municipality is very different from the way we tend to work — we are exploring things, innovating… but in this way, we have realised over 160 projects, until this year. We’ve done a lot of things.

MGThat's amazing, isn’t it? Is it a model that other places are interested in — have other towns or cities been in touch?

JP–IYes, and also private companies. When we finished the 2024 edition, we ran a call for proposals for global alliances: if you are a city, a public entity, or a museum and you want to do something with us, we can explore it. From that, we did something at BASE Milano; we also opened conversations with Ciudad Juárez in Mexico and others around the world. We are not trying to repeat the festival; it’s more about understanding what needs there are, and what issues could be explored. From that perspective, we try to imagine something, but it's a gradual process. We don't want to jump into things.

We also launched an educational program, delivered through schools across Spain. We send each school a “project box” with a lesson plan for teachers, following topics that we encounter in Concéntrico. The things that we are exploring are about adding new formats, not repeating the festival. At certain points, we can move some projects from Logroño to another place — to see how they activate other contexts. For example, the ‘dancing bench’ by Soft Baroque, which is currently in Logroño but will be moved elsewhere. It’s an installation that has a specific meaning within its context and site Logroño, but it can equally reveal new meanings in another place.

KOOZOne public phenomena that my students and peers have been willing to engage with recently is protest. Miles, you also mentioned activism as a ‘motivator’ that acknowledges the need to take up space in the civic realm.

MGOver the last year, after all the campus protests, the students in my thesis cohort were more explicitly, driven by a set of activist concerns, and that led to projects which were much more overtly critical, political and tied to very live, unresolved situations. For instance one student, Nezar Alkujok, developed a really beautiful, rich project; a magical realist vision to enact Palestinian cultural heritage through sufra, the act of gathering for a meal. This was enacted through a maritime procession centred around an archival vessel that held a set of artifacts collected from diaspora members, intended for eventual return to Palestine. There was also a project that was interested in creating a network of proxy consulates for the Iranian diaspora, in cities around the world. One student, Raha Sayeh, imagined a network of underground, alternative consulates for the Iranian diaspora, to platform Iranian culture abroad and offer consular services for those unsupported by the current regime. I think students feel an acute urgency and naturally want to mobilise that in their work, in a way that feels important. It feels like they're reclaiming the potential of architecture to take political agency in our work, both academically but also as a practice. 

In terms of the possibility of an architecture of expanded impact — as Common Accounts, we really have to credit Andres Jaque, who was our professor in grad school, for equipping us with that set of principles. He ran a studio at Princeton where Igor and I met, which was really focused on daily life. Andres understood that if architecture wanted to kind of reclaim its impact and relevance for a broader public, it really needed to intervene at the scale of the everyday. So there are projects that come out of this studio that view the scale of the everyday as an urgent political stage for intervention. Then too, there are projects that are perhaps operating at the scale of the every-other day — the fantastical. It has of course been amazing to explore the value in each of those approaches.

JP–II’ve been talking about real life and real connections between people, but we try to work with fiction too, blurring what's real and what's fiction in our lives. Especially as we are aware of so many real bad things, it’s important we try to imagine better futures and take political approaches. In some cases, it allows for a beauty that seems forbidden in other aspects of our life. Sometimes we forget the importance of those things: having a feeling for a second and remembering it forever, the impact of those kind of ephemeral things that become so relevant. I think that architecture can work more on those aspects.

KOOZBeautiful thoughts from both of you. I’m just thinking about our reticence to interact in public with each other, yet there's less fear about sharing opinions on social media, or even in the shared experience of a march. We are able to recognise why protests should take place, but we’re less ready to articulate our opinions to each other. Yet it is productive for those frictions to be discussed —

JP–IWe actually had protests taking place during the opening of the last edition. It was not up against us, but it was really nice because there was an unexpected interaction between people. They were making the biggest noise as part of their protest; finally, we moved from there. There were people from either side who had come to join either the festival or the protest, who didn’t know what was going on — but it's part of life. For me, it was part of what we have to manage. If it's raining, we have to manage; if there is a protest, we have to manage. The city is not our property, it's the property of all the people.

KOOZSometimes the way that public parades and marches make things can be quite difficult to digest. I’m thinking of public funeral processions for important people, where grief is openly expressed — that goes for Easter festivals in Europe too. In those cases, they both cross the taboo of discussing death in public, which is something we generally don't like to do. This is again why recent protests feel potent; they touch on poignant frictions in society.

MGThat's so important. I think that friction needs to be there, especially in projects with any element of improbability. There needs to be a consideration of the present tensions in order to enrich a proposition. Only then is a design proposal able to aspire to inevitability, which is for me, is an ultimate marker of success — where every gesture, every aspect of the work, feels inevitable — as if it had to be that way because of the rich constellation of frictions and realities that it contends with: that tethering to the real…

KOOZMaybe I can ask Javier to reflect on projects — 160 projects over ten years! — that created some kind of productive friction.

JP–ISure. For example, last year, we made this little house inside a monument called Monumento Espartero. It's a sculpture of a military general on a horse — a statue in the middle of a fountain. We have done a few things around that sculpture; once, during the COVID edition with Iza Rutkowska, who placed a wooden rocking horse just in front of it. It was a reference to the Trojan horse, but also a child’s toy in the middle of the city — a horse without a rider. The project I was thinking of was in 2024, by Willem de Haan. He's an artist working with contrasts; he comes from marketing and always plays with changing the meaning of places. He built a little house within the fountain — just around the plinth, with the statue of the general on it. The Dutch embassy agreed to help us build it, and the chief of culture said to me, this is going to be nice for the people. But it was designed to look like a house for sale, which responded to some of the issues around, like the problem of housing.

We built a platform over the fountain so visitors could get to the house — people wanted to go inside, even though it was just a shell around the plinth. What was amazing was that some of the older visitors showed me pictures from fifty or so years ago, when there actually was no fountain. Apparently there were some sculpted lions around the statue, and they had photos of themselves touching these lions on this site. They came fifty years later to take the same picture. There are so many meanings that can be read, and each person takes their own; this is the power of doing something in public, where not only the architects come to see what you’re doing. When someone who is 80 years old finds meaning, and young people also find meaning — this is the most important thing for me; when the conversation is coming from so many different voices.

KOOZI'm with you. To end on something we hinted at earlier: there's a rule-breaking imperative inherent in something that is destined to be ephemeral, is there not? The reference I have in my head is Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, where — even momentarily — you can upend the rules, changing social roles, swapping agencies. I wonder if that rings true for both of your operations.

JP–IYeah, that's really clear. The project by Benedetto Bufalino, ‘The Wooden Deck Over the Cars’. With this one, it was really nice when people suddenly appeared — for example, a whole football team from Burgos — and jumped over the cars. The role of the car was totally changed at that moment: what's the meaning of having a car? What’s the relevance of an old Fiat or an expensive BMW, if its only job is to support a wooden deck? Those experiences change a lot, just by putting a wooden deck over those cars. The flexibility that you add when you give people the scale of the city allows for new ways to work with space. The rules of being part of a place can change for a bit, and I feel that’s more and more needed now.

KOOZMiles, how important is transgression as a factor for you?

MGThat transgression can be so revealing. My student Huaqiu Wang, in his last year, developed for his thesis an intellectual property or IP exclusion zone, a kind of IP Red Light District… I love the projects my students produce, to the point where I'm regularly inspired to run our office more like the studio — having greater independence for our collaborators and those working with us. The work that they're producing is just so exciting. It's often the case that these students' projects are so brilliant, I just want to work on them myself!

KOOZThat’s gorgeous. Miles and Javier, thank you both for your time today — we’re so grateful.

Bios

Miles Gertler is a co-founder of the design-research office Common Accounts, together with Igor Bragado, which examines the intersections of the body with virtual and real spaces. He is also Assistant Professor of Architecture at the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto; his research and teaching investigates the spatial dimension of rituals, processions, and self-design.

Javier Peña Ibañez is an architect based in Madrid, working as a curator, researcher, educator, and consultant in the fields of architecture, design, and urbanism. He is the Director of Concéntrico, the International Festival of Design and Architecture in Logroño, and focuses on the management, curation, and promotion of cultural projects.

Shumi Bose is chief editor at KoozArch. She is an educator, curator and editor in the field of architecture and architectural history. Shumi is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history at Central Saint Martins and also teaches at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in London. She has curated widely, including exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2020 she founded Holdspace, a digital platform for extracurricular discussions in architectural education, and currently serves as trustee for the Architecture Foundation.