PPAA Extends Rafael Moneo's Logroño City Hall into Its Plaza with a Lattice of Metal Frames

Temporary installations in front of significant buildings usually go one of two ways. Some compete with the building, dropping a bright object into the square and hoping for photographs. Others retreat so far that they read as street furniture. Resonancia, built in 2026 by Mexico City studio PPAA (Pérez Palacios Arquitectos Asociados) for the Concéntrico festival, takes a third route. It sets a lattice of slender metal poles and open frames across the Plaza del Ayuntamiento in Logroño, Spain, and derives every alignment from Rafael Moneo's City Hall behind it.

What makes the piece worth your attention is the premise. Moneo conceived his City Hall as a fragment of the city rather than a freestanding monument, and the plaza is part of that idea. PPAA takes him at his word. Instead of adding an autonomous object, the studio treats the plaza's void as material and extends the building's geometry outward, the way a sound keeps travelling after it leaves its source. The result has no rooms, no roof, and no entrance. It is a field you walk through, and walking through it is how the project is meant to be finished.

A Civic Room Already in Place

Seen from above, Moneo's complex is already doing the heavy lifting. The stone-clad wings fold around the square, plane trees ring the edges, and the colonnade sets a measured beat along the ground floor. Any intervention here starts with a strong frame and a clear order, which is both an advantage and a trap.

PPAA's response is to read that order closely rather than react against it. The colonnade, the clock, and the tower on the skyline become reference points, and the installation stays low and thin enough that they remain the protagonists. We think that restraint is the smartest decision in the project.

The Grid as an Extension of the Building

From a high vantage point the logic becomes legible. Rows of poles and L-shaped frames spread from the facade toward the open city, picking up proportions and rhythms from the building. The lattice even slips under the colonnade, so the line between architecture and installation blurs at the exact point where most temporary pieces would keep a respectful distance.

This is a grid with a direction. It reads less as a pattern laid on the paving and more as a set of lines projected from Moneo's elevation, a three-dimensional echo of a two-dimensional order.

Compression and Openness

The density of the lattice is not uniform, and that is where the installation gains spatial character. In some zones the posts crowd together into something close to a thicket, compressing the view and slowing your pace. In others they thin out, and the plaza opens back up to its full scale.

Varying density is a cheap move in material terms and an effective one in experiential terms. It gives a flat, uniform square a sequence of tighter and looser conditions, a kind of informal choreography for gathering, lingering, or passing through quickly.

Pedestrians Finish the Work

The lattice is permeable in every direction. Children cycle past the poles, a lone pedestrian threads between the uprights and floor-level frames, and evening walkers cut across the field without breaking stride. None of these routes is prescribed.

PPAA frames this as movement completing the architecture, and the photographs support the claim. Empty, the grid reads as diagram. Occupied, it becomes a measuring device: bodies give scale to the frames, and the frames make the scale of the plaza and the building easier to grasp.

Shadow as the Second Drawing

In hard sunlight the installation draws a second version of itself on the granite. Long diagonal shadows stretch from each frame across the paving, and according to the designers these diagonals echo the rhythm of the windows along both wings of City Hall.

It is the most poetic aspect of the piece and also the most transient. The pattern shifts through the day, lengthens toward evening, and disappears under cloud. A minimal structure produces a constantly changing surface, which makes the plaza worth revisiting at different hours.

Light Structure, Reversible Intent

Up close, the construction is plain: open rectangular frames, vertical posts, bolted corners resting on the pavers. Sources differ on the metal, with some describing aluminium and the festival describing steel stakes, but the intent is consistent. The structure is lightweight and reversible, designed to leave the plaza as it found it.

That reversibility matters on a site like this. A temporary piece in front of a listed civic building should be able to vanish without a trace, and the bolted, modular detailing suggests PPAA designed for disassembly from the start rather than treating it as an afterthought.

Framing Moneo

Look through the uprights and the installation turns into a viewing apparatus. The frames crop the facade into segments, isolate the columns, and set the sandstone against tree canopies and sky. Familiar elevations become strange again, which is arguably the best thing a festival intervention can do for a building residents walk past every day.

Plans and Drawings

The site plans show the method clearly. The first maps the triangular City Hall footprint and its dotted column grids opening onto the square. The second traces a zigzag of lines across the paved center, and the third thickens that into a dense diagonal grid, ringed by the black circles of the tree canopies. Read in sequence, they show the building's order being pulled outward and multiplied until it fills the void.

Why This Project Matters

Resonancia makes a persuasive case that the most respectful response to a strong building can be an active one. PPAA does not decorate Moneo's plaza or argue with it. The studio reads the building's geometry and gives it a temporary physical presence in the space it was always meant to shape, using little more than poles, frames, and the shadows they cast.

For designers working on festivals, pavilions, and public-space activations, the lesson is about where the idea comes from. The concept here is extracted from the site rather than imported, which lets a very minimal structure carry a lot of meaning. It also reminds us that public space is not empty by default. A void like this one is a designed thing, and sometimes the most useful intervention is the one that helps you see it.

Resonancia Installation by PPAA, Plaza del Ayuntamiento, Logroño, Spain, 2026. Photography by Josema Cutillas and Milo Huet.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.