Germane Barnes debuts Intersect, an ephemeral play pavilion at the Concéntrico Festival in Logroño, Spain

Early this month, the Spanish city of Logroño hosted the eighth edition of its annual architecture and design festival known as Concéntrico. Nestled along the Ebro River in northern Spain’s wine-famous Rioja province, the city has hosted 91 ephemeral installations and 42 exhibitions and talks during the run of the festival’s seven previous iterations. This year, Concéntrico showcased another batch of impressive urban interventions from a slew of international designers and artists including Associates Architecture, Piovenefabi, SKULL Studio, Rintala Eggertsson Architects, BudCud, and Miami (via Chicago)’s very own Germane Barnes, an architect, designer, and educator who serves as director of Studio Barnes.

For Concéntrico 08, Barnes, 2021 recipient of the Harvard GSD’s Wheelwright Prize and a 2021­–2022 Rome Prize fellow, conceived Intersect, a pop-up play pavilion in the heart of the city that invites passersby to engage with the surrounding urban environment as a theater. MAS Context, a Chicago-based nonprofit led by architect, curator, and editor Iker Gil, supported the installation.

Intersect takes its name from the playscape’s three roughly 30-foot-diameter circles that converge at a looping, 15-foot-tall wooden superstructure that joins the trio of “land circles” to create a “zone of occupation for individuals which reference different components of a theater.” The installation’s location at the intersection of Gran Via and Daniel Trevijano Street, “at the actual crossing of major sidewalks,” is meant to “reinforce the idea of the city as a theatre to be celebrated,” detailed a description of the work.

Dubbed the Stage, Intersect’s first zone is envisioned by Barnes as an open-air space for theatrical (or not-so-theatrical) modes of expression with solar-powered lights affixed to the underside of the structure illuminating the area and its users. Spectators can sit and rest on modular seating created by the arc of the ground circle. The second zone is the Garden, which features five circular, plant-filled baskets suspended from the superstructure. Finally, there’s the Curtain, a crowd-pleaser comprised of thin threads encircling a segment of the superstructure. While the Curtain holds obvious appeal to younger users, the thrill of running—or dramatically parting and then sashaying—through a long, dangling veil never gets old.

Concéntrico 08 ran from September 1–6.

On the topic of things coming together, Barnes is also a featured participant in INTERSECTIONS: Where Diversity, Equity and Design Meet, a forthcoming series of talks and workshops held at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. Barnes will be on hand the evening November 10 to lead a discussion and host a screening of his award-winning short film You Can Always Come Home. More info about that event and the rest of the series can be found here.