Union Magazine: A Ball, a Wall, and a Little More
2050+ on Frontones Danzantes

There are endless ways to start a game. A ball could be kicked across the pavement, thrown against a wall, or sent astray in the direction of a passerby. Before the stadium, the scoreboard and the spectacle, many games begin with much less: somewhere to play.

It was this idea that drew Milan-based architecture studio 2050+ to the frontón, essentially a wall built to play against and central to pelota vasca, a family of Basque ball games. 2050+ conceived the frontón for the 12th edition of Concéntrico, the International Festival of Architecture and Design in Logroño. Their project Frontones Danzantes temporarily turned the city’s functioning Revellín car park into an open-air sporting ground, with three mobile frontones for pelota, basketball and football. For 2050+, whose practice moves between architecture, exhibitions, research and curation, at the intersection of politics, technology and the environment, the project brought years of thinking around sport, bodies and public space into an unusually immediate form.

The starting idea for the frontón was pelota itself. Historical images from the Basque region show players gathering around whatever architecture was already available: a church façade, the side of a house, or a wall capable of sending the ball back. Sport did not need to be separated from the rest of the city to occur; it integrated itself into everyday life. 2050+ founder and architect Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli points out that in Logroño, pelota has largely retreated from the street into dedicated sporting facilities. Frontones Danzantes reverses that trajectory, taking the wall back outside and asking an ordinary part of the city to become sporting infrastructure instead. As Pestellini Laparelli puts it, “a ball, a wall, and a little more” can be enough to reclaim a piece of public space.

The Revellín car park made that proposition particularly clear. Already surrounded by parks, walking routes and sporting facilities, its own use remained stubbornly singular: arrive, park, leave. For Pestellini Laparelli, occupying a car park also means taking on one of the assumptions around which the modern city has been organised: large amounts of urban ground reserved for private vehicles. In summer, the paved surface holds the day’s heat, acting, as Pestellini Laparelli describes it, “almost like a radiator”. The same ground given over to cars becomes increasingly difficult for bodies to occupy.

Against this fixed use, the frontones are designed to change. Customised poplar panels are fixed with clamps and bolts to load-bearing metal frames, each mounted on wheels. The dry-assembled modular system allows the walls to separate, gather and form new configurations across the car park; in the original scheme they could stand individually, create room-like enclosures or scatter across the site. Their profiles also take cues from historical and surrounding architecture in Logroño. Rather than building a sporting facility around one prescribed field of play, 2050+ made infrastructure that could be dismantled, moved and assembled again, allowing the sporting ground itself to remain in motion.

That mobility is also where Danzantes enters the name. Pestellini Laparelli describes much of 2050+’s work as sitting somewhere between architecture and performance, often drawing on moving partitions, objects and mechanisms. Here, the frontones have a precise function but behave closer to equipment than venue. And despite the research behind them, the intention was deliberately direct. Instead of a festival installation dependent on explanation, Pestellini Laparelli says they wanted “something that can be used instantly,” something whose purpose becomes clear through the act of playing.

In practice, the invitation went further than play. Pelota, basketball and football took place around the walls, but the uses soon widened. People sat within the rear supporting structures. Families arrived at night. A local Frisbee group used neither the frontones nor their intended sports, instead turning the area between them into its playing field. The heat shifted the rhythm of the installation too, with solar-powered lights extending their use after dark. For 2050+ curator and researcher Erica Petrillo, this was the project taking on a “performative life” of its own. Pestellini Laparelli remembers people sitting inside a part of the structure they had never designed as seating: “It just happened,” he says. “That’s the epitome of public space.”

But participation was not automatic. Some locals were angry about losing their usual parking spaces; others did not immediately understand that the frontones were free to use. Members of 2050+ began playing there themselves, showing by example what the structures were for before others followed. For Petrillo, that gap between invitation and occupation matters. Publicness is not simply a question of whether a place can be accessed, but whether people understand that they are allowed to act within it. Sport becomes useful here because participation is legible: somebody starts playing, and somebody else can join.

It helps explain 2050+’s affection for unfinished things. Pestellini Laparelli is blunt about it: “We hate projects which are too defined, too finished.” What interests the studio instead is the potential unfinished structures hold for occupation and reinvention. Petrillo talks about projects capable of assuming different identities across the day and night. Frontones Danzantes makes that position physical. The panels, frames and wheels are carefully designed; their arrangement is allowed to change. Like the game itself, the structure provides certain rules without predetermining everything that happens within them.

The studio has another word for temporary interventions of this kind: “rehearsal”. Pestellini Laparelli is careful not to present them as substitutes for permanent urban policy. Instead, he describes temporary projects as blueprints for possible alternatives: ways of testing a scenario at full scale and seeing what it produces. 2050+ hopes Frontones Danzantes might eventually grow into a wider family of frontones, reappearing in other cities and adapting to different sports, climates and local conditions. What moves is not only the wall but the model itself.

Sport is particularly well suited to that rehearsal. Pestellini Laparelli describes informal play as a way of “inhabiting the city together” and argues for the return of the “very minimum infrastructure” needed to play without first buying access to a private club. It is a modest proposition with a larger social consequence: a field of play creates a reason for people to share the same ground. Petrillo takes the idea further. The openness of genuinely public space, she says, forces us to encounter “otherness”: people outside the increasingly narrow social worlds we build around ourselves. Sport gives that encounter an uncomplicated structure. There is a wall, a ball, and a set of rules. Whoever arrives still has to work out how to play together.

Perhaps that is the proposition of Frontones Danzantes. Sport need not always be separated from everyday life, scaled up into spectacle or contained within permanent architecture. Before all of that, it can be a way of sharing ground. The architecture only has to make room for it. In Logroño, three movable walls are enough to begin.

This article was originally published in Union Magazine Issue 8.