Types of Spaces - Spain

About the project

Nothing but Bricks

The festival is over, the installation was taken down, but the memory of this special spatial adventure remains, because when does it happen that so much can be experienced in just 40 meters?

Concéntrico is the name of an annual festival taking place in Logroño, Spain that is intended to encourage people to consciously experience the city and to perceive or get to know urban places for the first time that are not normally the focus of attention. Interventions and installations explore interstices, create context, and link the past and present.

On the site of a former tobacco factory there is a narrow, short passageway, hardly present in the urban fabric, which leads directly to a high smokestack. Hanghar and Palma chose this location to implement a sequence of six strictly geometric spatial structures, made entirely of thermal bricks, on the same floor area that fits precisely between the walls of the adjacent houses and to provide a special experience away from the busystreets. One immerses oneself in a world that sharpens perception: of space, light, air and permeability, of progress and rest, of the static uniformity of brick walls.

Despite its linearity, the installation has a labyrinthine character due to the towering walls, which block any view except up and towards the smokestack, and which are surprisingly rearranged in all the courtyards.

In contrast to the perfectly constructed walls is the floor, covered in brick chips. It also contributes to the variety of sensory sensations: Walking requires attention and slowness. “It is a poeticm journey through different spatial schemes,” says jury member Christine Conix. “We see something powerfuland playful in it,” stresses Diego Escamilla from Palma – and both are right.