Header: Vladimir Partalo
Rotterdam studio STAR Strategies + Architecture has recently finished START-Ivry, a group of five housing towers in Ivry-sur-Seine, on the southern edge of Greater Paris, where the Seine meets the Marne. The practice, led by Spanish architect Beatriz Ramo, designed 288 homes that mix social, intermediate and market-rate flats in a single development.
The towers are located right by the river, which means that about nine in ten of the flats face two or three directions, many of them looking onto the water. The project won an award in the Social Housing category at the BLT Built Design Awards 2025, one of a long run of prizes it has collected over the past two years.
The idea
STAR built the project around a simple vision: that a home should change as the people inside it change. START stands for “Social, Transformable, Affordable and Resilient Typologies”, and the project’s motto is “form follows life”.
The starting point was the floor plan and the resident, and everything on the outside grew from there. The city even turned the usual order of hiring on its head, choosing the architect first and then inviting developers to compete for the job, which gave the design team unusual control over the plans. START-Ivry is the culmination of more than a decade of the studio’s work on housing that can adapt.
Flats that can be divided and rearranged
The flats were designed to be divided or combined according to changing household needs, without altering the overall footprint of the dwelling. A large multi-bedroom flat can, for example, be divided into a 2- or 3-bedroom apartment and a self-contained studio, while a super-versatile two-bedroom unit can accommodate a visitor, a relative needing care, or a home office. Extra space, created through “plus” typologies and “bonus” alcoves, can serve as studies, sleeping nooks or workspaces. Kitchens can be moved to free up another bedroom, and neighbouring flats can be combined when more space is needed.
Making this possible required careful placement of the elements that are difficult to move later. The architects grouped the service shafts and carefully organised the wet areas so that future changes would require minimal plumbing work. Corridors were minimised or put to use as storage, while a large number of kitchens and bathrooms benefit from natural light. Storage is distributed throughout the flats, allowing living spaces to remain clear and adaptable as household needs change.
Slender towers and a working façade
The towers are only about 14 metres deep, very shallow for buildings that rise to 56 metres. That thinness lets daylight reach far into each flat and lets air pass straight through from one side to the other. The façades don’t have a standardised look, instead taking the shape of how the building is actually used: windows, balconies, loggias (recessed balconies set into the wall) and small projecting boxes are placed wherever the flat behind them needs them.
The ground floor and shared space
At street level, a plinth holds 14 retail units, space for shops, restaurants, a bakery, a gym and a pharmacy, connecting the building to daily neighbourhood life. Around them are 2,600 m² of new public space, including a square facing the Seine and two footpaths that cut through the block and offer views of a nearby cable bridge.
More than 2,000 m² of shared terraces and communal rooms are distributed through the towers at different levels. Raw concrete and red walls reference Ivry’s architectural heritage, while colour coding reveals internal typologies, helping residents identify the different dwelling types. Two of the towers put different kinds of housing regimes (market-rate and social housing) along the same corridor, an arrangement that is rarely found in conventional residential developments in France.
Sustainability
Sustainability is approached broadly, combining environmental performance with long-term spatial resilience. START achieves a 20% reduction in energy consumption compared to current standards, uses 20% low-carbon concrete for both the structure and façades, and is heated through geothermal energy. But for START, sustainability goes beyond environmental performance: by allowing dwellings to adapt to changing household needs, the project can accommodate new situations without requiring relocation or additional construction. Adaptability therefore becomes a form of circularity at the scale of the apartment.
Project information
Architecture Company: STAR Strategies + Architecture
Lead Designer: Beatriz Ramo
Design Team: Danae Zachariaki, Efraín Pérez del Barrio, Ivan Guerrero, Geoffrey Clamour, Syeva Roest, Javier Cuartero, Bittor Arrillaga, Maria Castillo, Iris Ramas, Marc Coma
Landscape Design Company: Bernd Upmeyer / BOARD
Construction Company: Bouygues Bâtiment Île-de-France
Client: Phase 1, SADEV 94; Phase 2, SOGEPROM Réalisations
Location: Ivry-sur-Seine, Paris, France
Date: 2025
