client: Rijkswaterstaat, Rotterdam
team: Güller Güller architecture urbanism, Chora NL Amsterdam, London

Rijkswaterstaat's new Westraven building in Utrecht offers the ministry a chance to establish a Future Center. How to programme and develop the Future Centre as a protoype for constantly renewing a major organisation like Rijkswaterstaat? How to give Rijkswaterstaat new charisma, how to trigger, experimentation and innovation, how to set Rijkswaterstaat in motion, how to launch a more dynamic management of the ministry's processes?

The Future Centre is based on a four-in-one formula, tying together four fundamental activities: know-how (about changes and issues facing the world and humanity), innovation (how to respond with projects and prototypes), co-operation (partners and processes), and communication (formulation of Rijkswaterstaat's own goals and information towards the outside).

Programming the Future Centre is to programme Rijkswaterstaat. The Future Centre is to become the ministry's fool - challenging the ministry's philosophy, strategies, action and position. The Future Centre itself is the core of the ministry's charisma, dynamic, management - and space. It is the ministry's incubator and interface. The same dynamic it brings into Rijkswaterstaat as an organisation, it also brings into the ministry's new Wastraven building.

With five scenario-based interdisciplinary workshops, covering the concept (workshop nr. 1), the programming and networking (workshops nr. 2 and 3) and the spatial touch-down (workshops nr. 4 and 5), the programming study was the launch of the Future Centre as a continuous process of re-positioning Rijkswaterstaat.