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Inertia as a tool for friction in an age of terminal velocity

2026
Rotterdam Zuid, NL
Prix de Rome submission

Program: Territorial strategy - acupunctural design
Status: Competition

The Creative Industries Fund NL’s Prix de Rome Architecture 2026 invited spatial designers to explore the theme of "terminal velocity". The competition's brief highlights a tension between architecture’s promise of offering a better life through design and the reality of a rapidly accelerating world. It suggests that the "cumbersome" practice of architecture is struggling to keep pace, asking how the discipline can once again fulfill its promise, to what end, and for whom.

In response, this proposal questions the premise that spatial design must accelerate to survive. The true crisis of the Anthropocene is not that the world is moving too fast for architecture, it is that the world has lost its friction. We currently live in a regime of smooth flows (frictionless capital, invisible data, and sterile surfaces) that allows infinite economic trends to detach from finite material resources.

If architecture seems cumbersome today, it is because it is one of the last remaining sources of drag. In a world of terminal velocity, our spatial design practice needs to become the entanglement force. Embracing inertia as a spatial statement proposes a shift from architecture as an isolated object to architecture as an active entanglement with place, matter, and time.