Moving walls and street basket: the new face of sport by 2050+
Developed in the frame of Concéntrico Festival this past June, the installation of 2050+ is a reminder on how easy it is to regenerate spaces and how body can be a true activator of architecture and space
For festivals such as Concéntrico – the international architecture and design festival held every year in Logroño – the selection of installations capable of truly engaging with the city, being used and potentially offering transferable models, becomes increasingly central. And in this frame, we found examples of new, practical approaches – such as Frontones Danzantes, by studio 2050+.
In the wider landscape of architecture and design festivals, we are often confronted with a tremendous number of proposals, many of which do not really respond to the needs and conditions of the cities that host them. Public space is frequently treated as a field of display, where temporary architectures occupying streets and squares often become more present – and more visually intense – than the permanent urban fabric itself. In this way, the city is temporarily reframed as an exhibition space, and the ephemeral architectures that appear within it suspend our usual reading of urban space, exposing overlooked spatial and social dynamics that, in other conditions, remain latent.
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Frontones Danzantes by 2050 at Concéntrico 2026:
A temporary field of play
Concéntrico has consistently positioned itself as a platform for experimentation on new ways of understanding the city and public space, and on how architecture can reactivate sites that are underused, overlooked or reduced to purely functional conditions. Each edition returns to the question of how we inhabit architectural voids – transitional spaces, residual geometries, parking lots – and how these conditions can become active fields for public life rather than leftover urban gaps.
Starting precisely from one of these conditions, the installation Frontones Danzantes, designed by 2050+, transforms a parking lot in Logroño’s Revellín area into a temporary open-air field of play, activating a residual surface through a minimal yet highly charged architectural gesture. At first glance, the project appears simple, but its intensity comes from sports and collective practices already present in street life, which are translated into a spatial device capable of generating new forms of encounter and shared use.
The starting point is team sports such as basketball, football and Basque pelota – a discipline deeply rooted in northern Spain. From this, the studio develops a series of movable totems in the shape of domestic façades, recalling the genealogy of Basque pelota and its close relationship with architecture and public space. In fact, in this sport, civic walls are not boundaries but instruments of play, and the city becomes the field itself through the way the game is played in streets and squares.
That’s why the installation is organized around three mobile walls made of lightweight metallic supporting structures, easy to assemble, dismantle and reposition, which adapt to different spatial configurations. These three urban prototypes, placed in the parking area, are conceived as flexible devices that can be reoriented, relocated and potentially expanded over time and across different typologies, suggesting a transferable model for activating underused urban spaces.
Movable walls, changing configurations
The system is open-ended by design and allows the incorporation of additional sporting practices and spatial logics over time, from climbing structures to squash-like configurations and other yet-to-be-defined forms of physical interaction. The project avoids closure and instead proposes architecture as something that remains in transformation, where rules and uses are not fixed in advance but adjusted through practice.
Also, materially, the system combines modular timber panels with lightweight metal structures, prioritizing flexibility and reversibility as core design principles. This capacity for reconfiguration is the central condition of the project, because the walls do not define a stable spatial order – they generate a succession of temporary arrangements instead, and each configuration produces different ways of moving through the space, different proximities, different moments of encounter, turning the site into a shifting micro-urban landscape.
Space activated through use
Here, architecture stops working as a fixed background and becomes something that is activated through use – bodies that move through it, play with it, adapt it. Through this vision, space is produced in real time, through movement and repetition, rather than defined in advance. A basketball game, a group gathering, a change in orientation of the walls: each action slightly shifts the meaning of the place.
The project is part of Sport Stories, a research developed by 2050+ in collaboration with the Royal College of Art, which looks at sport as a spatial condition rather than a theme. Rules, equipment and movements are treated as tools that shape how space is organised and experienced, especially in informal or temporary contexts.
Within Concéntrico, Frontones Danzantes works as a small test on how public space can change through minimal interventions. It shows how a parking area can temporarily shift into something else without being fully redesigned or formalised. The interest lies in this short transformation: the way a space normally used for parking becomes a place for play, and then returns to its original function while retaining another possible reading.
And this is interesting, because put a focus on how ephemeral architecture can work in this interval, without replacing what is already there, or trying to fix a new order. It can act on existing conditions and make them temporarily visible in another way – and a wall can become a game device, a surface can become a field, and a residual space can become available for everybody.
About the author
Ludovica Proietti, journalist, design historian and curator, teaches in universities and curates events, always exploring projects with fresh, unconventional perspectives.
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