Rotterdam-based architecture practice MVRDV has won the international competition for the city’s new Shift Embassy, with a design called Rotterdam ROCKS! that reimagines the cultural landmark as seven stacked, porous “rocks” rising from the bank of the Maas. Selected by social enterprise Shift over four other finalists — Ecosistema Urbano, Heatherwick Studio, Mecanoo, and Office for Political Innovation — the practice’s design will anchor Waterkant, a new riverside district on the city’s south bank. The competition brief called for a landmark devoted to a future where humans and nature coexist, and MVRDV‘s answer folds a 5,000-square-metre immersive exhibition, a 200-room hotel, and a vertical public park into one structure.
A landscape, not a building is how MVRDV frames the proposal, describing it as a rocky green landmark that visitors move through rather than simply visit. The design is largely open to the public, with terraces, water features, greenery, exhibitions, viewpoints, and gathering spots layered along a continuous route — an approach that treats public accessibility as a starting condition of the design rather than an add-on.
Seven stacked rocks make up the building’s mass, organized around two internal cores that visitors move through via what the practice calls “caves.” One core serves the exhibition experience, the other hospitality and amenities. A third route winds up the building’s exterior, leading to a publicly accessible viewing terrace, while the rooftop holds a separate deck for exhibition visitors — extending Waterkant’s riverside tidal park vertically up the façade.
A visitor experience called Elysium anchors the cultural program. Rather than presenting sustainability as information to read, the immersive Elysium exhibition invites visitors to experience it directly through art, storytelling, and what the studio describes as practical pathways for action. The wider complex adds a 200-room hotel, education and event spaces, a food court, a restaurant, and an observation deck.
Reused steel targets 70 percent of the primary structure under the project’s embodied-carbon strategy, which aims to cut material-related CO₂ emissions by 30 to 50 percent against a business-as-usual baseline. The approach pairs low-carbon concrete with biobased materials — timber frame, CLT, hempcrete, and rammed earth — for non-loadbearing elements, and treats construction itself as a public experiment in low-carbon building, with open documentation of which strategies succeed.
Winy Maas, founding partner at MVRDV, described the ecological ambition behind the design: “Our design combines human and natural spaces, playing with porosity to keep the building compact while having the largest possible positive effect on local biodiversity.” The building’s skin is punctured with pockets and niches intended to hold soil, water, and shelter for birds and other animals, turning the façade into functioning habitat rather than decoration.
The jury’s verdict singled out the proposal’s break from convention. In its statement, the panel called the design “a remarkably bold, powerful statement” that departs from how sustainability is typically communicated, bringing together “joy, discovery, and surprise into a new architectural language.” The jury included figures such as Aric Chen of the Zaha Hadid Foundation and Géke Roelink, director of Rotterdam’s NEMO Science Museum.
Part of a larger district, Rotterdam ROCKS! sits within Waterkant, a development that will eventually bring 3,750 new homes, schools, a train station, offices, and cultural venues to Rotterdam’s south bank around a new tidal park. The Shift Embassy is positioned as the district’s cultural anchor, expected to draw around 700,000 visitors annually between the Elysium experience and the observation deck.
A two-stage selection process brought MVRDV to this point: the competition launched in January 2025, drew eighty initial submissions, and narrowed to five finalist teams that presented in March 2026. MVRDV’s winning team includes engineering and design partners Arup, Arcadis, DGMR, SB&Co, and Joris Laarman Lab, following a short pre-design phase this past June. A local participation process is scheduled for autumn 2026.
A monitor inside the exhibition core will trace the building’s own vital signs in real time — energy production and consumption, water cycles, vegetation growth, material performance — a live readout of a structure whose sustainability claims visitors can watch unfold rather than simply take on faith.
Rotterdam ROCKS! by MVRDV | Location: Waterkant, Rotterdam, Netherlands — Key materials: reused steel, low-carbon concrete, biobased materials (CLT, hempcrete, rammed earth)