Sustainability Landmark in Rotterdam: 5 Shortlisted Teams

The Shift Sustainability Landmark in Rotterdam has moved into its second stage, with five globally recognized architecture teams shortlisted to compete for the design of a 25,000 to 30,000 m² building in the city’s emerging Waterkant district. The competing firms — MVRDV, Heatherwick Studio, Mecanoo, Office for Political Innovation, and Ecosistema Urbano — each bring a distinct vision for what a 21st-century landmark dedicated to circular living and climate action could look like.

What Is the Shift Landmark Competition?

The Shift International Architecture Competition was launched in January 2025 by Shift, a steward-owned Dutch social enterprise focused on large-scale climate action. Its ambition is to design and build what Shift describes as “a new world wonder” — a landmark building that inspires behavioral change around sustainability through immersive experience, culture, and community.

The competition called for a building that makes circular living “tangible, desirable, and achievable.” Around 1,500 architects from 50 countries downloaded the competition brief, and 80 teams submitted proposals. In May 2025, five finalists were selected to advance to Stage Two, each receiving €40,000 to develop their concept further. The winning team will receive an additional €50,000, with the realized project carrying an estimated budget of €240 million.

The selected site is in Waterkant, a new waterfront district along Rotterdam’s southern riverfront. The brief specifies a 10,000 m² immersive experience space, a hotel, a conference and meeting center, and a sustainable food court. The building sits beside a planned tidal park within a broader urban expansion that will add housing, schools, cultural venues, and a train station to this stretch of riverfront.

Why Rotterdam? The City’s Relationship with Sustainable Architecture

Rotterdam is not a neutral backdrop for this kind of project. The city has long served as a testing ground for bold urban ideas, partly because much of its historic fabric was destroyed in World War II and had to be rebuilt from scratch. That history gave local architects and planners unusual freedom to experiment, and the results are visible across the skyline today.

Sustainable architecture in Rotterdam carries particular weight because of geography. Rotterdam lies largely below sea level, and the Dutch approach to water management has shaped both policy and design at every scale. Buildings here are expected to engage with flood resilience, energy performance, and material cycles in ways that go beyond standard code compliance. Several recent projects demonstrate that ambition — from MVRDV’s energy-neutral Portlantis visitor center at the port to the broader regeneration of the Wilhelminapier waterfront area.

The Waterkant district, where the Shift Landmark will be built, is part of a major urban expansion on Rotterdam’s south bank. As one of the most prominent landmarks in Rotterdam to be commissioned in years, the project signals the city’s continued interest in architecture that serves both civic and environmental goals.

The Five Shortlisted Designs

The five shortlisted teams bring together some of the most distinctive voices in contemporary sustainable architecture. Their proposals share a commitment to ecological performance and public engagement, but the approaches differ significantly in formal language, material strategy, and spatial experience.

MVRDV: Rotterdam ROCKS!

MVRDV, based in Rotterdam itself, proposed a scheme called “Rotterdam ROCKS!” — a stacked landscape of porous volumes described as living rocks. The design breaks mass into inhabitable fragments, allowing air, light, and vegetation to circulate freely through the structure. Its irregular geometry draws on the city’s experimental character, and the team collaborated with designer Joris Laarman, a pioneer in 3D-printed urban greening, to imagine how the building’s surfaces could become productive ecological systems.

Visualizations show a structure that resembles a large cluster of plant-covered boulders, with an entrance the architects describe as resembling the mouth of a giant turtle. For MVRDV, the proposal continues a long track record of projects that blend density, greenery, and public life — a thread visible in earlier Rotterdam projects like the Markthal and the recently opened Portlantis harbor visitor center.

Heatherwick Studio: Urban Reef

Heatherwick Studio, the London-based practice led by Thomas Heatherwick, submitted a proposal called “Urban Reef.” The design organizes the building as six distinct layers of activity that support one another in the manner of a reef ecosystem. Each layer is shaped by natural flows of movement, creating stacked zones for gathering, climate education, and shared experience.

The studio describes the building as being “influenced by natural flows of movement” where multiple layers “offer spaces that bring people together, build climate awareness, and show how a building can encourage lighter, more sustainable ways of living together.” Heatherwick Studio was among two firms pre-selected ahead of the open call, alongside Ecosistema Urbano, to help signal the range and ambition of the competition to potential participants.

Mecanoo: House of Shift Rotterdam

Delft-based Mecanoo submitted a proposal called “House of Shift Rotterdam,” centering its design language on upcycling, carbon storage, and energy neutrality. The scheme frames the building as an icon shaped by material cycles, with a strong civic presence defined by a tiered public plaza that rises through the building’s middle.

Mecanoo’s proposal integrates spaces for what the firm calls “imagination, exploration, action, play and joy” — language that positions the building not just as a sustainability demonstration project but as a genuinely public destination. The architects are well known for institutional projects that combine cultural ambition with careful technical execution, including the Library of Birmingham and the recently completed Portlantis-adjacent work in the Netherlands.

Office for Political Innovation: Climate Section

Andrés Jaque’s Madrid-based Office for Political Innovation (OPI) submitted a proposal called “Climate Section” — described as “a new kind of landmark for the Climate Age: not a monument, but a working section through the world as it is becoming.” The scheme positions the building as a place where climate is “sensed, understood, and actively reshaped, together,” placing community engagement and real-time environmental feedback at the center of the spatial experience.

OPI’s approach brings a distinctly political and research-driven dimension to the competition. Rather than staging sustainability as spectacle, their proposal frames the building as a live instrument for collective climate action.

Ecosistema Urbano: A Living Landmark

Madrid-based Ecosistema Urbano proposed “A Living Landmark,” conceived as a regenerative system that integrates public space with ecological performance. Their scheme imagines the building as an evolving social organism — one where biodiversity and civic life coexist through layered terraces, planted surfaces, and porous boundaries between interior and exterior.

The proposal emphasizes what the team calls “environmental feedback,” where the building’s performance becomes visible through vegetation, water management, and shared platforms. Like Heatherwick Studio, Ecosistema Urbano was pre-selected ahead of the open call.

What Makes Sustainable Architecture Work at This Scale?

Projects like the Shift Landmark raise real questions about what sustainability in architecture actually means when applied to a destination building designed to attract over one million visitors per year. The carbon cost of construction, ongoing operational energy, material sourcing, and visitor transport all factor into the real-world environmental performance of a building at this scale.

The five shortlisted proposals approach these questions differently. MVRDV’s living rocks strategy focuses on integrating vegetation and natural ventilation into the building’s mass itself. Mecanoo’s emphasis on carbon storage and energy neutrality suggests a more technical approach to energy balance. Heatherwick’s reef model prioritizes the relationship between spatial experience and behavior change. OPI’s proposal leans toward transparency and real-time feedback as the mechanism for environmental engagement. Ecosistema Urbano treats the building’s edges and transitions as the key site of ecological and social performance.

All five approaches reflect a broader shift in how architects think about sustainable green architecture: away from certification checkboxes and toward buildings that embed sustainability into their spatial logic and public programming.

The Jury and Selection Process

The competition jury includes a deliberately cross-disciplinary group: Aric Chen, director of the Zaha Hadid Foundation and former director of the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam; Ben van Berkel of UNStudio; and Carice van Houten, the Dutch actor and environmental advocate. The mix of architecture, cultural leadership, and public advocacy reflects Shift’s goal of designing a building that functions as civic infrastructure, not just architectural statement.

Three of the five finalists — MVRDV, Mecanoo, and Office for Political Innovation — were selected through the open call. Heatherwick Studio and Ecosistema Urbano were pre-selected by Shift ahead of the call, in part to signal the scale and caliber of the competition to municipalities that Shift was in discussion with for the building’s location. The winner is expected to be announced before the end of spring 2026.

Sustainability Architecture and the Purpose-Driven Landmark

The Shift Landmark competition sits within a wider conversation about the role of purpose-driven buildings in advancing sustainability architecture. Conventional green buildings reduce operational carbon, use certified materials, and optimize energy systems — but they rarely make those achievements visible or emotionally resonant to the people inside them.

Shift’s approach is different. The company — which runs digital programs designed to reduce individual carbon emissions through behavior change — sees the Landmark as a physical extension of its platform. The building is intended to give people a direct, experiential encounter with what a circular future could feel like, not just what it could measure.

This places it in a growing tradition of buildings that treat sustainability not as a technical problem but as a cultural and social one. The ArchDaily coverage of the competition notes that the project “aims to connect circular choices to everyday life and business,” a framing that positions architecture as a behavioral intervention as much as a built object.

Whether that ambition translates into lasting impact will depend on how the winning design handles the gap between initial visitor experience and ongoing behavioral change — a question that no architectural proposal alone can fully answer, but that each of the five teams has engaged with in different ways.