Resonancia
Concéntrico 2026 - International Festival of Architecture
Logroño City Hall, designed by Rafael Moneo, was conceived as a fragment of the city rather than as an autonomous object. Its architecture not only houses a public institution but also defines an open urban space where collective life can unfold. The plaza extending in front of the building is an essential part of this idea: a carefully bounded void whose public character emerges precisely through the relationship between the building and the city.
The proposal begins by recognizing the value of this void. Rather than following the common tendency to intervene in public space through the addition of new objects or structures, the project seeks to work with what already exists. It does not aim to occupy the plaza or compete with the presence of City Hall, but instead to reveal the spatial forces that shape it. The intervention understands the void as an active material, capable of being inhabited, traversed, and appropriated without the need to be physically built.
The notion of resonance emerges from this reading. Just as a sound continues to propagate beyond its source, the geometry of City Hall extends into the plaza through a grid that unfolds as a continuation of its architectural order. The intervention takes the alignments, proportions, and rhythms embedded within the building and projects them onto the public space, making visible a structure that was already implicit in the site.
This grid is materialized through a series of aluminum stakes that define a light, permeable three-dimensional lattice. Rather than establishing a boundary, they construct a field of relationships. The intervention is not perceived as an isolated object but as a minimal infrastructure capable of transforming the experience of the plaza. Its presence alters the perception of scale, introduces new paths of movement, and creates multiple opportunities for encounter, permanence, and exploration.
As it extends from City Hall toward the city, the lattice operates as an urban fabric connecting different scales and modes of occupation. Its varying density creates zones of compression and openness—spaces that invite both movement and pause. Its open condition allows each visitor to find their own way of inhabiting it: by passing through it, lingering within it, or simply observing how it changes through the movement of people and the shifting light throughout the day.
The materiality of the intervention reinforces this condition of simultaneous presence and absence. Constructed from aluminum profiles, the lattice achieves a precise definition and a recognizable presence within the plaza, while its reflective surface captures the light, the sky, and the movements of those who pass through it, partially dissolving its own boundaries. Aluminum allows the structure to be both visible and constantly changing: an element that manifests itself in space without imposing upon it. Its reflective qualities make both the plaza and City Hall integral parts of the intervention, continuously incorporating the surrounding context into the experience of the work.
The choice of this system also responds to a logic of lightness and reversibility. The intervention is conceived as a self-supporting structure composed of modular elements assembled without permanent fixings, minimizing its impact on the public space while allowing it to be dismantled without leaving a lasting trace. Rather than a fixed object tied exclusively to a single site, the project is understood as an open system capable of adapting, being reconfigured, and taking on new forms in different contexts.
This condition introduces a reflection on the temporality of urban interventions and on the material responsibility of contemporary architecture. Its components can be reused, transformed, or recycled once their life in the plaza has come to an end, extending the life cycle of the materials and reducing the demand for new resources. In this way, the proposal engages not only with the physical void of public space but also with the idea of a lightweight, reversible, and circular architecture, where permanence depends less on the material longevity of objects than on the relationships they are able to generate.
In this sense, the intervention does not seek to complete the plaza through the addition of an autonomous form, but through the activation of the spatial qualities it already possesses. The lattice functions both as an extension of the existing architecture and as a framework for collective experience. Ultimately, it is the presence of people—their movements, encounters, and interactions—that gives final form to the intervention.
Resonance thus proposes an alternative way of understanding public space: not as a place that must be filled, but as a void that can be intensified. Through a minimal operation, the geometry of City Hall extends beyond its physical boundaries and finds continuity within the plaza. The void remains open, yet acquires a new condition; it becomes an occupied space without being built, an architecture defined by relationships rather than volumes, where the city itself completes what the intervention merely suggests.
