Between 1850 and 1900, the city of Rotterdam transformed into an international harbour city. In the twentieth century, the harbour rapidly grew larger to being the largest harbour in the world for over forty years. The first part of the Maassilo was built in the beginning of the twentieth century. As the harbour grew larger, the Maassilo expanded along, in search for the enormous scale that the harbour gained in this period. Nowadays, the Maassilo is centrally located in the urban neighbourhoods of the city, while the harbour its activity is concentrated further west. Future plans of Rotterdam are to develop the nineteenth and twentieth century harbours into cultural harbour areas. The goal of the project is to (re)connect four different layers with each other: the new users of the Maassilo (makers, collaborators and visitors); everything that is integrated with Rotterdam as a harbour city, especially elements that make the building a ‘machine’; the new local cultural context; and the international cultural context. By connecting these layers, the Maassilo can still be strongly connected with Rotterdam as a harbour city, and at the same time with the new urban, cultural harbour area in the future. The goal is to create space for makers, collaborators and visitors, whose energy and activities are the fuel for this machine building for local and international exchange of culture. The building is divided into three zones, for each group of users, with individual routing for visitors, artists, makers and collaborators. A central hall with daylight, organic shapes and warm materials, adds a warm heart to the rather harsh and cold concrete building, while also connecting the infrastructure and different zones inside the building with the urban infrastructure in the surrounding area. The Maassilo is initially designed for storage and exchange of grain, not for a large amount of visitors. The spaces where used to be infrastructure for (vertical) transport of grain, are reused in this design to make elevators and stairs for the new users. As a visitor to the exposition space, you can experience the route of the grain: visitors travel to the top floors with an elevator and can walk down with a spiralling staircase inside the silos. Even if the exposition space is completely empty, there still is an exposition. The space that visitors move through, is now also exposing the Maassilo. The large amount of silos of the Maassilo are not only interesting to move through as a visitor. The silos also pose interesting opportunities to play with acoustics in the designed music hall and could perhaps play a role in storage of energy as a buffer for the building and the surrounding area. With this design, the Maassilo attempts to be a link between Rotterdam as a port city and the new cultural harbour area in the future. While giving space to different groups of makers, collaborators and visitors, and for (international) exchange of all sorts of cultural activity.