START-Ivry: Form follows life

Beatriz Ramo

The housing crisis today is not only quantitative but qualitative. While households have become increasingly diverse and dynamic-single-parent families, blended families, boomerang children, home-workers, ageing inhabitants, non-family cohabitations…-housing production remains largely standardised and rigid. Housing is treated as a market product focused on numbers: price/m², size, CO₂ emissions, construction speed… forgetting that housing does not host numbers, but people.

A diverse society cannot be contained within a standardised plan.

START-Ivry confronts this silent crisis. The project is grounded in more than a decade of research into contemporary ways of living, distilled into 10 Design Principles for Adaptability and 8 for Quality. These principles translate household diversity into concrete spatial solutions, restoring the intelligence of the plan and placing life—in all its diversity, temporality and unpredictability—at the centre of design.

Located in Ivry-sur-Seine, Greater Paris, START-Ivry comprises 5 buildings and 288 affordable adaptable dwellings—social, intermediate and controlled-market-rate. Super-adaptable and divisible dwellings, equipped alcoves, movable kitchens, thoughtful distributions… allow housing to evolve as lives change. Here, housing adapts to people-not the reverse. The project shows that significantly better housing can be achieved within conventional budgets, regulations and surfaces.

START-Ivry reframes sustainability as social resilience. Adaptability becomes a form of circularity at the scale of the apartment. The most sustainable square metre is the one that does not need to be rebuilt.

START-Ivry demonstrates that adaptable housing can operate as social infrastructure rather than merely as a market product, revealing that the future of housing may not lie in producing more dwellings, but in creating dwellings capable of remaining relevant throughout the complexity of human life.

Project Gallery

A new skyline for Ivry-sur-Seine and the banks of the River Seine.

A clear five-step process which translates the needs and realities of contemporary households into architectural solutions.

Narrative façades: window jambs follow a colour code reflecting the interior functions, while the colours of the loggias highlight the different parts of the tower.

Each tower is structured in three distinct parts, creating three vertical readings to support its integration into three different contexts: the street, the city, and the sky.

START offers twelve distinct common terraces distributed across several levels. The common spaces and their turquoise terraces, are located on the 7th floor.

Examples of dwellings: Super-adaptable and divisible dwellings, equipped alcoves, movable kitchens, thoughtful distributions… allow housing to evolve as lives change.

Beatriz Ramo NL

https://st-ar.nl/
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