The Shift Architecture Competition

Conceived as a regenerative living system where architecture becomes a dynamic social organism

The building integrates public space, ecological performance, and civic life, actively fostering biodiversity while strengthening connections between local communities and broader ecological networks. More than a building, it is an evolving ecosystem designed to grow, adapt, and give back.

Green public areas expand and inhabit the structure allowing visitors and locals to traverse the building from the ground floor Plaza to its “Observation Stage Summit”. Along this vertical journey, they engage in a creative dialogue with a range of hybrid indoor programs, including exhibition and cultural spaces, a hotel, restaurants, a convention center, and co-working areas.

Vision for the Elysium Experience

The Elysium Experience is conceived as an integral component of the Living Landmark: a spatial catalyst designed to transform climatic paralysis into tangible agency. By materializing visitor intent through a series of immersive thresholds, the architecture bypasses the “freeze response” typical of the climate crisis. The design operationalizes the five-stage emergency model theorized by Frantz and Mayer, augmenting it with experiential “chapters” that bridge the gap between cognitive awareness and long-term behavioral change. Rather than a passive exhibition, Elysium functions as a behavioral machine, using sequential programming and social engagement to cultivate profound, intrinsic motivation. 

Landscapes, atmospheres, and programmatic elements shift gradually, allowing visitors to navigate different states, from observation to interaction, and from interaction to commitment. The sequence operates as a vertical and spatial journey, embedded within the broader Green Commons, where public life, ecology, and climate awareness intersect.

At its core, the “material archive” is a socially interactive and participative space, where visitors engage directly with an archaeological perspective on everyday objects, deconstructing their life cycles to reveal their hidden planetary impact. Through collective exploration and shared interfaces, processes of extraction, production, and disposal become visible, grounding the experience in tangible realities while highlighting the connection between individual choices, collective behavior, and environmental consequences. The archive ultimately empowers visitors with a renewed sense of collective agency, inspiring them to contribute to meaningful, shared environmental change.

Vision for Sustainability

The Living Landmark is selectively wrapped in a bio-receptive layer that supports the life and development of diverse species: plants, insects, and birds. Green species grow over a mix of greenhouse textiles and biodegradable nets, anchored to a lightweight structure of reclaimed steel and timber, forming a 3D surface where species can nest and thrive. This adaptive envelope not only creates urban habitats but also performs climatic functions, regulating temperature and responding to changing weather. The “Polinature Habitat” transforms the building into a living landscape, where architecture, ecology, and technology merge into a dynamic urban ecosystem.

The material strategy of the Living Landmark is rooted in Rotterdam’s context and prioritizes regional abundance: reclaimed steel from decommissioned North Sea oil platforms. Reused for both the primary structure and secondary elements, it significantly reduces embodied carbon emissions. The design is conceived for disassembly, enabling components to enter future lifecycles and return long-term value to the city.

About

Ecosistema Urbano is an architecture and urban design studio based in Madrid and Boston, operating at the intersection of urbanism, environmental design, and social innovation. Their practice applies design thinking across disciplines—architecture, landscape, engineering, and sociology—to develop climate-responsive and socially driven urban environments. They define their approach as urban social design, exploring how spatial strategies, environmental conditions, and interactive systems can enhance community self-organization, social interaction, and relationships with the environment. Rather than creating isolated objects, they design adaptable ecosystems that integrate nature, technology, and public life. 

Their work spans urban consultancy, public space design, and large-scale transformation processes, from concept to implementation. With projects across Europe, the Americas, Asia, and the Middle East, they collaborate with governments, institutions, and international organizations to address global challenges such as climate change, urban density, and inclusion, fostering more resilient, participatory, and livable cities.

A new building for Rotterdam, built from six layers of activity that support one another like a reef‑inspired ecosystem.

Influenced by natural flows of movement, these layers offer spaces that bring people together, build climate awareness and show how a building can encourage lighter, more sustainable ways of living together. In Rotterdam, a city unafraid to reinvent itself and one deeply connected to water, the realities of climate change are felt directly. Along the River Maas, the site is a natural fit for the Shift mission’s home: a landmark that enables collective transition at scale. 

Heatherwick’s design approach celebrates these six layers through a strong yet gentle silhouette, with an expressive façade that reveals the vertical ribs of the structural logic and flowing lines inspired by tidal movement. These lines create openings for terraces, windows and entrances, blurring inside and out and connecting people with their environment. Anchored along the riverside, the building feels both distinctive and welcoming – an inviting presence that fits its surroundings while proudly standing apart.

Vision for the Elysium Experience

The Elysium is positioned within the second of the six layers of the building, directly above the Welcome layer so it feels present and accessible to everyone who arrives. Elevated to offer views across the river, it wraps around the triple-height ‘Hall of Imagination’. Together they form the Inspire layer.

The Elysium is conceived not as a conventional exhibition but as an unfolding emotional journey that inspires visitors to see themselves and the world anew. Spread across four levels and organised into eight interconnected chapters, it guides people through shifting states of awareness – from wonder and disruption to clarity, commitment and action. Rather than following a typical educational path, the experience is designed as an inner transition, with architecture, media and encounter working together to spark curiosity, connection and determination. 

The journey begins on Level 01, where visitors enter the Central Hall – a generous, light-filled threshold with views to the Maas and a cabinet of sustainability curiosities introducing Shift’s mission. From here, Chapter One presents a sensorial timelapse celebrating Earth’s beauty, swiftly disrupted in Chapter Two as the world collapses into rubble, revealing a troubling landscape framed by five immersive pods that expose the myths delaying meaningful change.

Chapter Three shifts to a data-driven atmosphere where visitors scan their climate footprint before choosing one of two paths – a moment of personal agency. A kaleidoscopic tunnel fractures visions of possible futures before Chapter Four reunites visitors beneath a vaulted media canopy that celebrates resilience and renewal. A ramp leads to Chapter Five, where totem-like installations form an interconnected whole.  Chapter Six introduces forums of pioneering ideas and artistic responses, demonstrating possibility in action. 

Sustainability: Living Lighter Together

Heatherwick’s sustainability vision, living lighter together, is anchored in three pillars, building lighter, experiencing deeper and coming together. Building lighter is grounded in reducing embodied carbon through extensive timber use, passive climate strategies and a design prepared for future adaptability. Experiencing deeper encourages people to feel climate, nature, and materiality through exposed structure, unconditioned volumes, open air terraces, like in the Hall of Imagination where the timber structure is at its most expressive, allowing visitors to feel climate, nature and the beauty of natural materials.

The events space embodies the spirit of coming together, supporting community, debate and global conversations, framed by river views and soft timber curved structure. The food court celebrates the joy of food with open-air terraces and links to local networks. In the hotel, natural materials and low-tech systems create calm, restorative spaces. At the summit, the observatory forms a protective reef-like ring with 360-degree views for reflection. The external skin and interior finishes draw on biobased and recyclable materials reducing waste, while natural ventilation, daylighting and integrated water systems enhance performance. A modular, layer-based design ensures resilience as programmes evolve. 

The story we want to tell is one of coexistence: a reef-like ecosystem that supports lighter, collective ways of living; a place that lifts people up, builds connection and belonging, and inspires us to live more lightly on the planet.

About

Heatherwick Studio composed a team purpose-built for this ambitious, sustainability-led project: an international, multidisciplinary group grounded in local expertise and united by a collaborative spirit. Together, we bring the breadth needed to support a landmark conceived as a living, interconnected system.

The core team integrates architecture, engineering, sustainability and exhibition design. Heatherwick Studio leads the design with Rotterdam-based Nudus as Local collaborative Architect. Ramboll partners with Oosterhoff Projects to bring engineering and sustainability expertise, while Ralph Appelbaum Associates shapes the exhibition and narrative experience. Their combined skills ensure technical rigour and an experiential identity that is deeply engaging.

The wider team, RLB, Plan A Consultants and Designers Unit, provides cost management, coordination, signage and wayfinding. A network of creative collaborators enriches the project throughout: materials engineer Zoe McGlaughlin; experiential specialist David Sheldon Hicks; regenerative design expert Patrick Bellew; couturier and artist Iris van Herpen; designer Sabine Marcellis; and visual artist and film director Gabriel Lester.

At the House of Shift Rotterdam, worlds of sustainability intertwine in an inspiring and captivating way, opening their doors to the surrounding neighborhoods, Europe, and the world.

The iconic House of Shift is so simple that a child can draw it. A composition of a hill, a tower, and a Box lifted on monopiles with a sphere balancing on its edge. An architecture driven by a sustainability vision that places bold upcycling, carbon storage, energy neutrality, and ecological integration at its core. Integrating spaces for imagination, exploration, action, play, and joy. 

A healthy restaurant opens onto the Garden of the Senses with its own terrace, supported by an herb garden.

“An inspiring icon for sustainability that places bold upcycling, carbon storage, energy neutrality, and ecological integration at its core.

The Great Hall, embedded within the hill, is constructed from urban-mined recycled concrete. An outdoor acoustic landscape under a mirrored soffit that reflects the surroundings, offering new perspectives is The Hill of Sounds. At its center, a circular void frames the sky, the Circle of Hope, which transforms into a waterfall when it rains.
 

The Tower of Change serves business-oriented visitors, students, and researchers. Stacked spaces are filled with daylight and expansive views, including coworking areas, event spaces, and a café.

The Entrance

Elysium Experience

Vision for Sustainability

he Elysium is a mysterious Box, elevated on red monopiles, two floors high, with a circular light-well that provides daylight and orientation. The structure is composed of a hybrid system of reused steel and innovative timber floor slabs.
The Elysium opens the doors of perception, transporting guests on an emotional journey through immersive environments where they explore the forces shaping our world and practical tools for transforming our future. In the Meditative Garden, artistic interventions restore perspective, reconnecting guests with living systems. The Market of Big Ideas inspires action through accessible initiatives, while the celebratory descent transforms visitors into Shift ambassadors, committed to accelerating climate action.

Visitors start their journey navigating the forces that shape our present, confronting the five myths that hold us back and discovering how these barriers can be transformed into practical tools for shaping a preferable future.

In the Meditative Garden, immersive artistic interventions slow the pace and restore perspective. Here, guests reconnect with the interconnectedness of all living systems and rediscover the quiet magic of the everyday. From reflection, the journey shifts toward agency.

The Market of Big Ideas offers a multitude of tangible entry points into the Shift movement; hands-on, practical, and immediately accessible Balancing on the edge of the mysterious Box is The Sphere, made of timber and accessible from the Meditative Garden. Its exterior incorporates LED technology to convey real-time information about the state of our planet.

The Garden of the Senses is an outdoor space, highlighting the six monopiles that transform into elegant solar trees like blooming structures.

Stacked landscape of living rocks that turns architecture into a regenerative, urban ecosystem and a new landmark for the city: rocks that breathe

The proposed Landmark concentrates 25,776 m² of gross floor area within a minimal footprint of only 2,250 m² touching the ground. By stacking Shift’s program as box-like volumes the majority of the site remains open public space for social and ecological regeneration. 

The boxes are rounded to allow for more external habitats and experiences while making the building more compact. The rounded shapes form domes, optimizing structure while making amazing, large open space interiors. They form new rocks. A public geology.

Inside Rotterdam Rocks are voids, caves, for every part of the program. They overlap and interconnect to allow for access and orientation. They create continuous internal routes, and make addresses within the building. A speleological experience comes alive. 

The envelope of Rotterdam Rocks is formed by a net made of re-used steel that integrates installations – the ‘veins’ of the building. This structure supports a modular, low-carbon concrete façade made of cast and 3D printed panels, which contain cavities: for soil and plants, for water, for insects and birds, for light, for access and energy, for illuminating ‘glowing’ stones.

Vision for the Elysium Experience

Access points on ground and mobility hub levels are the starting point for the different visitor routes: ticketed, programmatic, and service. This program is then shifted to bring outdoor spaces in between. This creates terraces, light, air, views, hanging gardens where humans can breathe, where water is stored and soil can settle, where plants and food can grow, animals can nestle… The shift makes the building more ecological, friendly and human. 

Inside Rotterdam Rocks are voids, caves, for every part of the program. They overlap and interconnect to allow for access and orientation. They create continuous internal routes, and make addresses within the building. A speleological experience comes alive. 

One route brings the paying visitors from the entrance cave, via the 8 experience grottos to the rooftop with the Michelin restaurant space. From here they stroll down though the public 3D park. If desired, the inverse sequence can be arranged: one then takes the lift and strolls down through the inversed experience spaces.

Another route brings visitors from the entrance halls to the event hall, the office void, surrounded with office floors, and the hotel atrium, surrounded with rooms that spill out onto the rock gardens. From the different domes the gardens can be accessed.

Vision for Sustainability

The Rotterdam Rocks! Landmark uses a combination of load bearing steel and concrete with biobased non-loadbearing elements. This enables to create a spectacular high-rise building while reducing its carbon footprint where materials are used according to their properties: concrete and steel where necessary, circular and biobased materials where possible. 

Shift reduces its carbon footprint by 30% to 50% by making use of low-carbon concrete and reclaimed steel elements in partnership with Heidelberg Materials and Heerema. These come together in a modular approach to create a straightforward load bearing construction with 3D printed façade elements. To further reduce the carbon footprint, non-structural walls and floors use biobased materials such as timber frame, CLT, hempcrete and rammed earth.

The landmark reduces energy consumption by creating different thermal zones in the building. Some functions, like the restaurant, offices and hotel, ask for high quality indoor environment. Other functions such as the Elysium experience, entrance or food
hall allow for more fluctuation with the outdoor climate, thereby reducing energy consumption.

About

Rotterdam ROCKS! is the result of a collaborative effort led by MVRDV, who guided the overall design vision and coordination through a research-driven and highly collaborative approach. Arup, Arcadis and DGMR bring leading expertise in engineering, sustainability and the built environment, ensuring technical performance and environmental ambition are embedded from the start. Joris Laarman Lab drives innovation in advanced fabrication and material research, while Studio Bertels, together with Tamschick Media + Space and Expo Pavilion Group, creates immersive, transformative visitor experiences. The team works in an integrated, parallel process, where design, performance, and experience are developed together rather than in sequence. 

Not a monument, but a working section through the world as it is becoming — a place where climate is sensed, understood, and actively reshaped, together.
Climate change isn’t something happening “out there.” It’s woven into the air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil beneath us, the cities we’ve built, and the economies we depend on. The Climate Section doesn’t treat climate as a problem to study from a distance, it treats it as something we all live inside, and can actively shape together.

Located in Rotterdam, a city built on a delta, where engineered infrastructure and natural water systems have always collided, the project takes the form of a vertical park: a gently rising, fully accessible pathway that takes visitors on a journey through ecological landscapes (wetlands, forests, dunes) and the invisible systems that sustain them. 

t’s not a museum or a destination. It’s a new kind of civic space: somewhere people return to, move through, and make their own.

The central idea is Climate Abundance, the belief that tackling climate change shouldn’t mean sacrifice, but can mean more: more green space, more comfort, more shared resources, more
life. The project improves daily life in Rotterdam South through
better connectivity, public space, and environmental services. Climate action as added value, not
burden.

Vision for the Elysium Experience

Climate Section is not a place that explains climate. It’s a place where climate is lived, and where that living becomes a form of collective action. 

Instead of simulating nature and staging exhibitions on climate action, the building is nature and climate in action. Soils filter water. Microbial communities process carbon. Weather shifts as you move through it. Augmented reality layers onto this living environment, making invisible processes visible: where carbon travels, how sediment moves, why humidity changes. Visitors don’t watch a show. They find themselves inside a working system.

At the heart of the experience is a journey through deep time. Visitors walk through reconstructed landscapes — ancient forests, peat bogs, clay layers, coastal dunes — not as dioramas, but as living ecosystems. Moving through them makes the full story of carbon tangible: how it was locked in the ground over millions of years and how quickly it is being released. 

Climate change stops being an abstract graph and becomes something you can smell, touch, and feel beneath your feet. This journey culminates in the Chamber of Pledge, a public space where personal intention becomes collective action. Here, visitors articulate commitments that are recorded and shared beyond the building, forming a growing chorus of people taking responsibility together. Climate action is framed not as private guilt but as a public and shared declaration.

The experience ends in the open air, suspended above Rotterdam. Visitors breathe shared atmosphere and release seeds that the wind carries beyond the site. It’s a small, real act of regeneration.

Vision for Sustainability

The central idea is Climate Abundance, the belief that tackling climate change shouldn’t mean sacrifice, but can mean more: more green space, more comfort, more shared resources, more life.

Wet Abundance. Rainwater and greywater are collected, filtered naturally through soils and plants, and reused for urban farming and public landscapes. Water becomes a shared resource, not a threat.

Thermosocial Abundance. Geothermal energy heats a public square where people gather, cook, and repair things together. Higher up the structure, shifting temperatures and humidity allow humans and wildlife to share the same space.

Energy Abundance. Solar and renewable energy is paired with thermal storage: surplus electricity is converted into cooling, stored as ice, and released when needed. The building becomes a participant in the city’s energy system, not just a consumer.

Abundance of Fertility. Organic waste is composted and turned into nutrients that feed the building’s own gardens. Nothing is discarded; everything cycles back into life.

Transspecies Abundance. Habitats for birds, insects, and plants are built throughout. The project is designed for humans and the wider web of species that cities depend on.

About

Office for Political Innovation (OFFPOLINN) Is an architectural practice, based in New York and Madrid, working at the intersection of design, research, and body-environmental practices, and are the authors of the awarded Reggio School in Madrid, the TBA21 Ocean Space in Venice and the Babyn Yar Museum of Memory and Oblivion in Kyev. They have been distinguished with the UNESCO Global Award for Sustainable Architecture, the Frederick Kiesler Prize, and the SILVER LION of the 14th Venice Biennale. Its work is part of the collections of MoMA and the Art Institute of Chicago. OFFPOLINN was founded and is lead by Andrés Jaque. Andrés Jaque is an architect, writer and curator. He is the Dean and Professor of Architecture at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. He has also been Visiting Professor at Princeton University and The Cooper Union. He has been an Alfred Toepfer Stiftung’s Tessenow Stipendiat and Graham Foundation grantee. In 2018 he co-curated Manifesta 12 in Palermo, The Planetary Garden. Cultivating Co-Existence, and he is the Chief Curator of the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water.