Warsaw-based studio TŁO borrows a Polish devotional shelter typology built for pilgrims arriving on foot and repurposes it as pure climate infrastructure for Los Sábados, a temporary timber canopy shading a narrow passageway in Logroño, Spain, for the city’s Concéntrico festival. Presented in June 2026 as part of the festival’s twelfth edition, the installation carries the Polish sobota’s original defense against rain across an ocean of context into a defense against sun and heat instead. The result treats hospitality itself, not form, as the thing worth translating.
The Polish sobota that inspired the project is a roofed, semi-open shelter attached to wooden churches, built to receive worshippers who had walked from distant villages the day before Sunday mass. Its significance came from function rather than form: protection from the weather, and a place to pause without needing to explain why one had come.
A wordplay across two languages gives Los Sábados its title: los sábados simply means “Saturdays” in Spanish, and the coincidence lets TŁO carry the Polish sobota into a Spanish city without translating it literally, keeping the same word doing different work in each language.
The passageway itself sits in Logroño’s historic centre, next to the former tobacco factory that now houses the Parliament of La Rioja, and functions as a heavily used pedestrian route every day of the year, not only during the Concéntrico festival.
Timber slats, cut from a mix of reclaimed structural insulated panels and new ones, are threaded onto steel rods and suspended above the passage, forming a canopy that behaves like shingles on a church roof but filters light rather than shedding rain. The entire structure is held between the two façades by compression-mounted steel braces, without a single anchor fixed into the historic walls on either side.
Stone kerbs, borrowed from the municipal depot and arranged as seating beneath the canopy, complete the installation’s basic offer: shade, a place to stop, and protection from direct sun during the hottest hours.
Nothing here is permanent by design. As a fully demountable installation, the steel braces are dismantled and stored after the festival closes, and the stone kerbs return to the depot they came from — a temporary answer to the same question a permanent aluminium dome in Chattanooga asked more lastingly: whether shelter can be civic infrastructure without needing to become a monument.
Los Sábados by TŁO (Michał Sikorski, Filip Pawłowski) | Where: Logroño, La Rioja, Spain — When: 18–23 June 2026, Concéntrico Festival | In collaboration with the Polish Institute in Madrid, the Institute of Creative Industries, and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, as part of the Polish Culture in the World 2026 programme.