ippolito pestellini laparelli and erica petrillo of 2050+ on ‘the parking lot that forgot itself’

THE PARKING LOT THAT FORGOT ITSELF

A few weeks ago, in Logroño, in the Basque Country, a parking lot briefly forgot it was a parking lot.

For Frontones Danzantes, a public installation we designed for the twelfth edition of Concéntrico, three mobile walls transformed the Revellín car park into a temporary landscape for Basque pelota, basketball and football. Built from timber panels and steel frames, the walls could dance – they could be moved, rotated and recombined, allowing the space to change throughout the festival. The three walls were the visible expression of a broader proposition: to demonstrate that public space is not a fixed condition but something that can be continually reclaimed and resignified. By interrupting the everyday logic of the parking lot, the installation temporarily returned a fragment of the city to collective use.

Concéntrico 2026, Frontones Danzantes by 2050+ | image by Marco Gambarè

Basque pelota has always understood this. Descended from the eighteenth-century jeu de paume, it never depended on purpose-built stadiums. A church facade, the blank side of an apartment block or a retaining wall could all become a court. The game did not require new architecture; it required a different reading of the architecture already there.

The intervention of Frontones Danzantes was temporary and, by definition, limited in its scope and radius of action. It did not pretend to solve the structural problems endemic to Logroño. Its power lay in producing a proof of concept and operating at the level of symbols. It created tangible evidence that the city can be otherwise, and that alternative uses of public space are possible — restoring agency to those inhabiting it and offering a blueprint that can be restaged elsewhere.

Concéntrico 2026, Frontones Danzantes by 2050+ | image by Sara Cuerdo

A Barometer of the Urban Commons

Cities have long been the‬‭ backdrop for everyday, informal sport — played in streets, squares, and parks. Yet these public spaces are increasingly under threat, eroded by financialization, redevelopment, and growing forms of regulation and surveillance. As many thinkers, including artist and technologist James Bridle, have argued, ‘contemporary systems of surveillance increasingly extend beyond the sports field into the wider urban environment, shaping how cities are monitored, controlled, and experienced.’ Public spaces are designed not only through what they allow, but through what they prevent: informal gathering, unplanned occupation, and forms of play that fall outside predetermined uses.

This erosion is not abstract. In England alone, 250 school playing fields were lost between 2010‬‭ and 2021‬‭, while in many European cities, less than‬ 10% of public space is designed with‬ children in mind – a stark reminder of how publicness is being sidelined in contemporary urban‬‭ planning. As accessible play areas vanish, so too do the conditions that support informal,‬ unregulated forms of public life.

Through this lens, sport reveals relationships that architecture alone often leaves invisible. Like a social barometer, it exposes the presence – or absence – of meaningful public space and its overall health. When present, it reveals who has access to it: is a playground genuinely open, or fenced and controlled? Does it exist only as an amenity in wealthier areas, as urban decoration for luxury developments, or does it also serve as a social valve in less affluent neighborhoods?

It is here that sport reveals itself as an alternative social contract. A community, a wall and a ball are enough to establish an agreement: a set of shared rules, mutual responsibilities, and a temporary commons brought into existence through participation. This social contract does not seek to domesticate competition or depoliticize conflict, difference, or disagreement; it redirects them, transforming them into a cathartic ritual through which rivalry can be expressed and negotiated without violence.

What sustains these last urban strongholds against‬ commodification — an informal football pitch, a basketball hoop attached to the side of a building; a skate spot emerging from an overpass – is not only a material infrastructure itself, but the network of care that forms around it: the collective willingness to maintain, protect and keep alive the conditions for play. Seen this way, sport is a barometer of the urban commons: it reveals where spontaneous forms of gathering are still possible, and where communities retain – or have lost – the capacity to take ownership of the spaces they inhabit.

Scugnizzo Liberato in Naples | image by Jonni Woo

The Spectacle and the Ritual

Reading of sport as a prime manifestation of the urban commons should not be mistaken as naïve. Sport is also a field of immense economic and political power. As we write, the latest World Cup has just come to an end. The final was watched by almost 1.5 billion people worldwide, while the tournament mobilized one of the largest industries on the planet: a global business of billions of dollars built on broadcasting rights, sponsorships, hospitality, merchandising and infrastructure.

This is sport in its most spectacular and institutionalized form: a carefully orchestrated machine involving federations, corporations, governments, media networks and some of the most expensive and resource-intensive architectural infrastructures ever built. Yet, beneath this vast apparatus, something remarkably simple remains.

At its core, football – and sport more broadly – is still a popular ritual. Alongside music, perhaps no other cultural form retains such an ability to move people voluntarily, spontaneously and collectively. It crosses borders and generations; it creates temporary communities among strangers; it gives diasporic communities a renewed sense of connection and belonging. It can easily become a vehicle for nationalism and political instrumentalization, but it can also generate moments of solidarity that escape (and, in fact, challenge) those very structures.

Countering the diplomatic theater that accompanies the world’s largest sporting events, one of the most powerful images of recent tournaments was that of football supporters in Gaza, packed onto rooftops and wherever a view was possible, following Egypt’s national team – and later Morocco’s and Spain’s – with all the intensity of a stadium crowd, in solidarity with nations that had taken a public stand against the genocide of Palestinians. It was a reminder that beyond the infrastructures of power built around sport, there remains a more fundamental force: its ability to create shared emotional territories, sustain belonging, and bring people together when almost everything else pushes them apart.

This is the paradox at the heart of sport. It is simultaneously one of the most commercialized industries in the world and one of the last truly popular rituals.

Palestinian football fans gather among war-damaged buildings in Gaza City to watch the 2026 World Cup round of 16 match between Argentina and Egypt | image by Mohammed M. Skaik

Treading a tightrope

Contemporary sport does not merely contain contradictions. It was born from them. As scholar Ibiayi Briggs argues in Body Culture and Contrology, the emergence of modern sport in the nineteenth century – with its codified rules, organized clubs, and expanding mass participation – was closely tied to the transformations brought about by industrialization. It emerged, in part, as a response to the alienation of modern life: a way to reconnect individuals with their bodies, to escape the monotony of repetitive labor, and to reclaim a sense of physical agency in an increasingly mechanized world.

Yet this promise of liberation was always accompanied by a push in the opposite direction – a ‘contrology,’ in Briggs’s terms. The same culture that encouraged people to rediscover their bodies also produced new forms of discipline, measurement and control. Sport offers a temporary escape from the constraints of industrial society while simultaneously internalizing its logic: efficiency, optimization, competition and performance. The body became both a site of freedom and a site of regulation.

various exercise postures supported by the Wunda Chair, invented in 1945 by Joseph Pilates

This tension has only intensified. Today, the sporting body is celebrated as an expression of individual potential, yet it is also increasingly monitored, quantified and optimized. From biometric sensors and performance analytics to fitness platforms and wearable technologies, the contemporary sporting body has become a living laboratory: a measurable, data-rich system to be improved and potentially monetized. Increasingly, this logic extends far beyond elite sport, shaping everyday expectations around health, productivity, and self-management.

The list of paradoxes goes on. Whether the question is gender, race, disability or class, sport is rarely ahead of society, nor simply behind it. It is an obvious arena where structural injustices are exposed, contested and occasionally overturned. It can offer glimpses of alternative ways of living together – more inclusive, more diverse, more equitable – while simultaneously reproducing the very inequalities it appears to challenge.

This is the tightrope sport has always walked: between tensions and opportunities, liberation and control, pleasure and performance, self-expression and self-optimisation. Sport reveals not only what bodies can do, but also the social, economic and political forces that determine what bodies are expected to become.

Mental Athletic, THE LOST SYMPHONY. New Balance, Grey Noise, 2024

Sport Stories

As spatial practitioners who engage critically with the discipline, we are often struck by a certain imbalance within contemporary architecture: a remarkable capacity for analysis, critique and diagnosis, but a much more hesitant relationship with proposition and transformative action. The analytical teeth of the discipline have been sharpened to razor blades, yet the space for testing alternative possibilities – however small, provisional or imperfect – often remains limited.

This is one of the dimensions that attracts us most to sport. Sport is not only a subject to be observed; it is a field of experimentation. It lends itself naturally to tactical appropriations and acts of spatial improvisation. It offers a territory where ideas can be tested through bodies, encounters and collective participation rather than only through representation.

This attitude – world-oriented, light and strategic – is at the core of Sport Stories: Beyond Competition, Towards New Politics of Movement, the design studio we launched in 2025 at the Royal College of Art in London. The studio explores how the tensions and contradictions embedded in sport also unfold through and within space: from the macro-scale of changing landscapes and environments, to the urban scale of cities, to the intimate scale of bodies.

Torre David, Caracas, Venezuela, 2011 | photo: Iwan Baan

The Magic Circle

The students’ projects explored subjects ranging from the spatial politics of changing rooms to stadiums as repositories of collective memory, from sport as a site of surveillance and extraction to informal sporting practices as experiments in alternative forms of urban life.

Beneath these diverse inquiries was a shared commitment, or fascination: the possibility of introducing a ‘glitch’ into existing systems — not as a grand gesture, but as a precise intervention capable of temporarily altering the rules of engagement. The projects explored how small-scale, tactical actions can hack established spatial conditions, creating brief opportunities to rehearse new ways of practicing sport together and, by extension, of gathering, celebrating, and inhabiting space together.

They are, in a sense, a-go punctures: small points of disruption that pierce the surface of the everyday. The area they affect may be limited, but their effects can travel outward, producing wider reverberations—like ripples spreading across water

In Homo Ludens (1938), historian Johan Huizinga described a similar concept through the notion of the ‘magic circle’: a temporary world of play governed by its own rules. Architecture has often interpreted this literally, enclosing play within permanent stadiums and arenas. Informal sport suggests another possibility: the magic circle does not need to be fixed in space to exist. It can appear for an afternoon, transform a parking lot, and disappear again—leaving behind not a building, but a renewed sense of what a place might become. Like an ultimate form of world-building, informal sport creates temporary spaces of autonomy and collective imagination. In the context of the progressive erosion of public values, and of the increasingly aggressive data extraction and digital surveillance to which we are subjected, a multiplicity of bodies – in their most essential biological dimension—remains a final frontier of freedom, emancipation, and resistance.

from the project Scraping The Piste by Luke Yeulett, part of the ADS8 Sport Stories design studio

from the project The Anti-Mass Game_ by Elena Crockett, part of the ADS8 Sport Stories design studio

from the project The Machines Are Unravelling by Chantelle Chong, part of the ADS8 Sport Stories design studio

2050+ (@2050.plus) is an architecture studio based in Milan, working across diverse forms of critical spatial practice at the intersection of technology, politics, and the environment. Founded in 2020, the studio develops projects in architecture, exhibition design, and curatorial practice, as well as independent research that includes moving images and critical writing. 2050+ also collaborates with fashion brands on temporary installations, special events, and films, and is actively involved in academic teaching, leading the design studio ADS8 – Sport Stories at the Royal College of Art in London.

Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli is an architect and curator whose work encompasses technology, politics, design, and environmental practices. Formerly a partner at OMA, he founded the interdisciplinary agency 2050+ in Milan to deploy space as a medium rather than a goal. Ippolito teaches at the Royal College of Arts in London Data Matter, a research and design studio exploring the entangled relationship between data and the material world. His work has been shown internationally in various institutions, festivals, and exhibitions.

Erica Petrillo is a curator and researcher with a background in political philosophy and social sciences. She has curated public programs and exhibitions for various cultural institutions, in Italy and beyond. Prior to joining 2050+, she worked at The Museum of Modern Art in New York, where she was responsible for the series of monthly R&D Salons; co-curated Broken Nature, the 22nd Triennale di Milano; and was the 2019-20 curator-in-residence at the van Eyck Academie in Maastricht.

This guest essay is part of designboom’s PLAY chapter, exploring what would happen if form didn’t follow function, but pleasure. Discover more stories that celebrate joy, imagination and playfulness here.

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