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Concéntrico: Urban Innovation Laboratory

  • Edited by

    Javier Peña Ibáñez
    Nick Axel

  • Art direction and editorial design

    Casao–Terrazas

  • Editorial

    Park Books

  • Fotografías

    Varios autores, principalmente:
    Josema Cutillas
    Javier Antón
    Sara Cuerdo

  • Concéntrico: Urban Innovation Laboratory brings together a selection of the more than 150 ephemeral interventions carried out during the festival’s first ten editions. The main editorial challenge was to organize the enormous visual archive accumulated over a decade and transform it into a clear and useful reference book, capable of constructing a transversal narrative and avoiding a strictly chronological reading.

    The book is conceived as a journey. The opening dialogue functions as a compass and gives way to a series of thematic axes that relate the projects through shared questions and concepts. From there, the pages combine diagrams, photographs, details, and general views to construct a dynamic reading that combines information and context with the experience of the interventions and the relationships they establish with public space.

    The design is articulated through a flexible grid, which organizes highly heterogeneous documentation. The images, diagrams, and bleed texts explore the limits of the format, while photographic rhythms and white spaces create a physical and temporal sequence from which to discover how the festival has transformed spaces, relationships, and ways of looking at the urban environment. The typographic contrast (serif for Spanish and sans serif for English) facilitates bilingual navigation and allows immediate recognition of the different reading levels.

    More than a compilation of projects, the book functions as a living archive in which architecture, urbanism, design, and cultural practices intersect to show the city as a space for experimentation and collective learning.