Maasvlakte3: space for civic pleasure

Type | Architecture/Speculative project    Year | 2026    Project site | Rotterdam, NL

Client | Submission entry for Prix de Rome 2026 - Honourable mention

Maasvlakte 3: Space for Civic Pleasure proposes a third position between techno-triumphal complicity and eco-primitivist retreat. It takes the Maasvlakte 2 NATO transshipment hub in the port of Rotterdam as its site and asks a direct question: if titanium, composites, and extreme durability are considered rational for weapons systems, why are they irrational when applied to housing, care, and everyday life?

The project argues that rearmament is not a deviation from the Great Acceleration but its late style; an acceleration regime that converts ecological limits and political anxiety into a new growth narrative, diverting public resources precisely as social and ecological crises deepen. Architecture, positioned downstream of these decisions, faces a crisis of agency. This project refuses that position. Drawing on the Lucas Plan of the 1970s, in which workers at Lucas Aerospace proposed redirecting arms production toward socially useful goods, the project repositions architecture as an interface between power and scarcity — a protocol for seizing advanced productive capacity and redirecting it toward collective life. The port's fabrication chains, materials, standards, and expertise are contaminated by civic logic: the public bathhouse becomes more generous than the private spa, social housing more durable than speculative development.

Sustainability, the project insists, must be desirable. It must arrive not as a smaller, poorer version of the present, but as a world where common spaces invite encounter and comfort is collective rather than exclusive.