Monumental Splash

SalazarSequeroMedina
Paseo del Espolón
2025

Monumental Splash is a device that transforms one of Logroño’s main monuments, the Espartero Fountain, reinterpreting it as a kind of ephemeral municipal swimming pool — a public space for everyone centered around water.

This edition of the Concéntrico Festival focuses on rethinking Logroño’s public space to tackle the urban heat island effect, the climate phenomenon where city centers, filled with hard surfaces and lacking vegetation or water spaces, become more vulnerable and prone to extremely high temperatures. The proposal brings citizens to the water’s edge, fostering a more direct and intimate relationship with the fountain, temporarily turned into an oasis in the heart of the city.

Monumental Splash creates a playful, accessible, and inclusive setting that brings the coolness of water to the public on the hottest and longest days of the year, making public space more resilient to extreme heat while highlighting the crucial role of water — a scarce yet essential resource — in combating the climate crisis. It is an ambiguous infrastructure, open to appropriation and various forms of civic participation. The aim is to create a domestic atmosphere, a comfort zone where people can sunbathe, take a refreshing walk along the water’s edge, or celebrate the Summer Solstice.

The installation challenges how we understand and coexist with monuments — their relevance and their function as landmarks in cities that must adapt to climate change. Beyond the festival, the proposal underscores the need to create more public spaces that can be claimed and used in diverse ways — pools, fountains, parks — as vectors for a more equitable and heat-adapted city.

Its construction relies on off-the-shelf, rented, and low-cost elements. A tectonic ring-shaped structure surrounds the fountain, creating a distorted inside and outside, much like the fences of municipal swimming pools. The scaffolding, forming a sort of fairground platform, is combined with blue-painted wooden panels on the interior. The simplicity of the proposal — a wide edge around the fountain — facilitates its assembly and disassembly and allows for the reuse of its components in future Concéntrico-related events.