Los Sábados
Concéntrico is an international festival of architecture and design held in Logroño, in Spain's La Rioja region. Each year, for a few days, it fills the squares, courtyards and passageways of the historic centre with temporary installations, inviting studios from around the world to test ideas for public space at 1:1 scale.
We wanted to bring to Logroño a piece of Polish hospitality — the kind that shelters any traveller from the weather, without asking why they came. That is the logic of the Polish soboty, and it is what our installation carries across.
Los Sábados is a temporary wooden canopy installed in a narrow passage in the city centre, right beside a former tobacco factory — today the seat of the La Rioja regional parliament. The passage is an intensely used pedestrian route on any given day; in the heat, the canopy introduces shade and a place to pause. Here architecture appears as climatic infrastructure — not an iconic object, but basic equipment for a city responding to its environmental conditions.
The reference point is the soboty — covered, semi-open galleries around Poland's wooden churches, built to shelter the faithful arriving on foot, often from far away, the day before Sunday mass. Their significance came not from form but from function: they offered protection from the weather and let people stop without having to explain why. The Spanish los sábados simply means "Saturdays."
In Logroño the same idea answers different conditions: not rain, but sun and heat. The installation regulates the microclimate passively.
Wooden slats, cut from a mix of rejected and new sandwich panels, are threaded onto rods and suspended over the passage. Like the shingles of a church roof, they come together into a perforated covering that filters light rather than shedding rain. The whole is held between the two facades by steel struts working in compression — without a single anchor point in the historic walls. The semi-permeable structure responds to the movement of the sun, tracing shifting patterns of light and shadow through the day. Stone kerbs, arranged as seating, complete it — together they provide a basic set of conditions: shade, a place to pause, and protection from sun exposure.
The installation is entirely demountable. After the festival, the steel struts are unbolted and stored, and the kerbs return to the municipal depot they were borrowed from, to be used elsewhere.
The project belongs to an ongoing series of experiments at TŁO exploring "textiles" built from rigid elements.
Los Sábados turns a narrow passage into a temporary, sheltered urban interior — an accessible, non-hierarchical infrastructure of shade. It adds no new programme, but reinforces a potential that already existed in the place. Numerous music and cultural events took place there during the festival.
The installation was realised in cooperation with the Polish Institute in Madrid, the Institute of Creative Industries, and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, as part of the programme "Polish Culture Abroad 2026."
