"Dance, dance… otherwise we are lost." This oft-cited phrase by Pina Bausch encapsulates not only the urgency of movement, but its capacity to reveal space itself. In her choreographies, space is never a neutral backdrop, it becomes a partner, an obstacle, a memory. Floors tilt, chairs accumulate, walls oppress or liberate. These are architectural conditions, staged and contested through the body. What Bausch exposes — and what architecture often forgets — is that space is not simply built, it is performed. Her work invites architects to think not only in terms of materials and forms, but of gestures, relations, and rhythms. It suggests that architecture, like dance, is ultimately about how we inhabit, structure, and emotionally charge the spaces we move through.

Historically, architecture and dance have operated in parallel, shaping human experience through the body's orientation in space and time. From the choreographed rituals of classical temples to the axial logics of Baroque palaces, built space has always implied movement. The Bauhaus took this further, as Oskar Schlemmer's Triadic Ballet visualized space as a geometric extension of the body. This was not scenery, but spatial thinking made kinetic. In the 20th century, choreographers like William Forsythe and Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker integrated architectural constraints into their scores, while architects such as Steven Holl, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and Toyo Ito designed buildings that unfold as spatial sequences, inviting movement, drift, and delay.

+ 35

As cities continue to develop, we are seeing ever more well-planned, thoroughly executed, and tightly regulated approaches to shaping urban centres and their surrounding spaces—for better and for worse. As codes, restrictions, and guidelines improve and tighten, urban environments become safer, more balanced, and less prone to surprise. Yet the flip side is that highly managed districts can drift toward over-order and sanitisation, shedding the messy, accretive character that once produced alleyways, residual spaces, and unexpected sequences of movement—conditions often born from ongoing community improvisation in the grey zones of regulation.

In response, a growing number of initiatives around the world are proposing short-term urban installations that test alternate futures for the city. These works aim to provoke dialogue between what the city is and what it could offer its communities through thoughtful, context-specific spatial practices. One notable example is Concéntrico, the international festival in Logroño, Spain, conceived as an urban innovation laboratory. Marking its tenth edition, the festival is about to publish Concéntrico: Urban Innovation Laboratory, a book that surveys a decade of urban design and collective transformation shaped through successive editions of the festival. Its launch is paired with an international tour designed to share a decade of insights on collective transformation and design.

+ 32

As climate instability reshapes design priorities, architecture is increasingly drawn into ecological debates not as a spectator but as a participant. Among the concepts gaining traction is rewilding, a practice rooted in the restoration of self-sustaining ecosystems through the reintroduction of biodiversity, the removal of barriers, and the rebalancing of human presence in the landscape. Though often associated with conservation biology, rewilding also opens up new spatial and architectural imaginaries — ones that challenge conventional notions of permanence, authorship, and use.

+ 68