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Civic anchors

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




2026
Rotterdam - NL

Competition
Prix de Rome 2026






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 questiones 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. Embrassing inertia as a spatial statement proposes a shift from architecture as an isolated object to architecture as an active leverage. 


The stratigraphy of a sinking city


This proposal targets the stigmatised and threatened districts of Bloemhof, Tarwewijk, and Carnisse in Rotterdam Zuid. These areas host impoverished communities on sinking soil and buildings (due to foundation pile rot). As seen in the redevelopment of the Tweebosbuurt, urban renewal is destructive, demolishing the current housing stock and displacing local communities while rebuilding new homes for new inhabitants.

This sinking problem has become an argument for erasure, fuelling a socially unequal situation up to active segregation (through the “instrumental demolitions” of the Woonvisie and the income-based segregation strategies of the Rotterdamwet): while politicians and developers are eyeing these areas to create a renewed city, they are denying the social legacy of these neighbourhoods and displacing impoverished communities.

A retrospective look of urban renewal and housing crisis movments in Rotterdam, learning from the sequels from the Tweebosbuurt



Civic anchors: designing for social equality


The proposal questions this mechanism and advocates for improvements rather than displacements and erasures. As David Harvey argues, "the right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a collective right to change ourselves by changing the city". A way forward should be the primary driver of urban renewal rather than a complete restart.

While urban improvement takes time, this submission proposes to start with the design of civic anchors, multifunctional landmarks and structures impacting the sinking underground (lower part of the model) and stabilising the social sediments of these neighbourhoods (upper part).

These structures (symbolised by the red elements in the model) are piercing through the ‘paper reality’ of these neighbourhoods (the middle part), proposing an alternative model to tabula rasa policies and developers' appetite for new buildings.

A short-term step towards a brigther future


Strategically located, these elements, seen as lithopunctures within reality, should become prosthetics for these shrinking neighbourhoods, acting on the soil, becoming water buffers to mitigate pile rot while steering local community dynamism through building and exterior programming, a bottom-up approach for these neighbourhoods' revitalisation.

In the long term, these anchors should empower local communities, giving them the opportunity to flourish after having been neglected and stigmatised for so many decades.
The statement object in its entirety, from the underground (bottom part) to the social sediments (upper part), the paper reality threatening and disconnecting the two (middle part), and the civic anchor interventions (red elements).
The underground layers of the chosen area, reflecting the pile rot and sinking problematics through the use of materials and ground mined from the streets.
Within the paper reality of the Rotterdamwet and the Woonvisie: an extract from the statements regarding the Tweebosbuurt demolition and the right to adequate housing by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
Within the paper reality, a specific chapter of the former Woonvisie (2023) actively segregated new tenants based on their income levels.
The social sediment layers of the chosen neighbourhoods in Rotterdam Zuid, composed of materials and fragments mined directly from the local streets.
The role of the civic anchors: connecting the underground and social sediments of the neighbourhood while bypassing the ‘paper reality’.
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