MVRDV has won the international design competition of social enterprise Shift for the “Shift Embassy”—a major cultural destination in Rotterdam that aims to inspire visitors to help realising large-scale ecological and societal change.
Motivated by the competition brief’s goal to create a landmark devoted to a future where humans and nature live in symbiosis, MVRDV’s proposal—dubbed “Rotterdam Rocks”—sets out to act as a landscape along the river Maas.
Programme
The Shift Embassy aims to inspire visitors with a 5.000 m2 immersive experience called “the Elysium”. Rather than explaining the future, The Elysium invites visitors to experience it through immersive art, inspiring stories and practical pathways for action. It will also feature a sustainable hotel with 200 rooms, spaces for education, business events and gatherings for local communities, a food court, a restaurant and an observation deck. The project’s overarching goal is to create a major cultural destination in Rotterdam that accelerates the behavioural, systemic and social changes required to build a more resilient and sustainable future.
Jury: “Bold and unconventional”
The jury described the winning concept as follows: “MVRDV’s proposal is a remarkably bold, powerful statement that we expect will capture visitors' imagination and encourage them to come back again and again. Rotterdam Rocks departs from how sustainability is traditionally communicated, bringing together joy, discovery, and surprise into a new architectural language. We anticipate this building and its program will invite people to rethink their everyday behavior and encourage new ways of living sustainably together."
MVRDV: “Spaces for humans and nature”
The Shift Embassy is conceived as a purpose-driven destination combining immersive art, architecture, community building, storytelling, and real-world examples of sustainable living and business practices.
MVRDV founding partner Winy Maas: “Our first step in approaching this design was to expand the brief—we need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and to create inclusive spaces for people, trees, plants, for water, air, and for animal habitats, balancing the need for new built space with new landscapes to compensate our ecological impact. Our design integrates these human and natural spaces, playing with porosity to keep the project compact while maximising its ecological value.”
The seven stacked rocks that make up the building are arranged around two key routes through the building’s “caves”: one for the exhibition experience and another for the project’s hospitality functions. A third exterior route twists up the sides of the rocks, leading to a publicly accessible viewing terrace, while the top of the building features a rooftop terrace for visitors to The Elysium. These terraces extend the riverside tidal park vertically, enveloping visitors in the nature that finds its home on the building’s surfaces while offering spectacular views of Rotterdam. To enable this proliferation of nature on its surface, the skin of the building is covered with pockmarks and niches that provide space for soil, water, plants, and animals.
As part of the design’s own sustainability ambitions, the construction of the Shift Embassy will become a form of public experiment, an open documentation of which low-carbon construction strategies succeed and which do not, and which approaches succeed in minimising the ecological impact of construction. The project will serve as a scale-up lab to test and showcase the latest innovations in low-carbon construction, helping to advance sustainable building practices across the industry.
Grand finale of a unique selection process
The Shift International Architecture Competition launched in January 2025 as a two-stage competition inviting multidisciplinary teams of architects, engineers, artists, scientists, ecologists, and other experts to develop holistic design proposals. After receiving eighty proposals for stage one, five finalists—Ecosistema Urbano, Heatherwick Studio, Mecanoo, MVRDV and Office for Political Innovation—continued to the final stage. Their designs are also available on shift.world.
