Summer Shapes Memories

OFREIA — Office For Revealing Encounters in Architecture
El Cubo
2026

Memory often comes as a version of the truth —the truth we want. We remember, and we remember what we want. Summers, in most memories, have the rhythm of a week; they arrive with striped patterns, the noise of water and the smell of heat. Summers want to be remembered.

SUMMER SHAPES MEMORIES draws from the collective memory of the Ebro riverbanks in Logroño. For decades, summer life unfolded around the river: clothes were washed in its waters, fish were caught for the feast of San Bernabé, and informal bathing spots gradually became places of leisure and encounter. In the late 1960s, La Playa del Ebro turned from a spontaneous riverside gathering into a public swimming facility built directly within the riverbed, surrounded by a whole constellation of summer infrastructures —changing rooms, picnic areas, a pelota court, bars and small boat docks. Around them, stories and local myths accumulated over time: La Guillerma, Juanito el Manco, El Pasti, figures still deeply embedded in the city’s imagination.

The installation revisits these memories through a temporary intervention on a large concrete basketball court in the Oeste neighbourhood, beside the Ebro. A dense fog system turns the hard surface into an artificial water landscape, across which small boats —recalling those once rented by El Pasti— drift slowly, letting visitors navigate the mist toward a central pavilion inspired by the remembered image of Juanito el Manco’s bar. Rather than reconstructing these places literally, the project treats them as fragmented memories, distorted by time, storytelling and imagination, as a stage for projection and performance. Historical photographs reappear inside the pavilion as postcards, and visitors are invited to write down and send a summer memory, so that personal and collective recollections of the river may circulate through the city once again