STAR strategies + architecture
STAR is a practice engaged with architecture in all its forms.
STAR strategies + architecture was founded by Beatriz Ramo in Rotterdam in 2006. The office is interested in all subjects directly or indirectly related to architecture and works on projects and research at every scale, taking responsibility for each phase of the process—from concept to completion.
STAR has won awards in international competitions for collective housing, public buildings, and urban planning in France, the Netherlands, China, Iceland, Lebanon, Norway, and Spain. The practice has also received several distinctions and been named a finalist in awards organised by iF Design, Architizer, Archello, Dezeen, the German Design Council, FRAME, The Pineapples, Azure, and MIX Interiors.
The office’s portfolio encompasses a wide range of projects: from a hybrid complex combining a Ferris wheel and a railway station, a multifunctional cinema adapted to city centres, and a 50-hectare urban plan for a flood-prone site, to an eighty-metre-long panorama representing the European Union, developed in collaboration with and commissioned by OMA/AMO.
That said, since its creation, affordable, adaptable, and evolutionary housing has been STAR’s main field of research and experimentation. The office has explored these subjects in depth through competitions, commissions, texts, and research—both self-initiated and funded—progressing from theory to full-scale experimentation.
STAR has extensively researched the adaptation of housing to changing lifestyles and the growing diversity of contemporary households; the optimisation of “servant” spaces; the scalability of apartments; the maximisation of space; the modulation of heights; and, above all, the capacity of housing to function as real social infrastructure.
The results of this research include The Interior of the Metropolis, a year-long study translating household needs into spatial solutions; the concept of Co-Residence, developed for the French government before shared living had become established as a meaningful housing model; The Cabanon in Rotterdam, a fully equipped 7 m² apartment and a radical experiment in space; the Cadrete House, a low-budget evolutionary house; and START-Ivry in Greater Paris, which materialises the office’s housing theories in a built project comprising almost 300 affordable and adaptable dwellings.
STAR also maintains an active practice of research and writing. Its text O’Mighty Green, a satire criticising the opportunistic confusion between sustainable development and greening in architecture, was translated into thirteen languages and published in more than thirty countries.
STAR is also a regular contributor to MONU magazine on urbanism, where Beatriz Ramo has served as managing contributing editor and a member of the editorial board since 2008. As an extension of its research projects, the office is academically active at several schools and institutions in the Netherlands, conducting courses and research ateliers on architectural typology, urbanism, interior architecture, and criticism.
The work of STAR has been widely published in more than fifty countries and has appeared in major international media, including The New York Times, de Volkskrant, Corriere della Sera, El Pais, El Mundo, Libération, L’Humanité, Vogue, and Elle, as well as in leading architecture magazines such as AA Files, Arch+, Arquitectura Viva, Casabella, Le Moniteur, Domus, Abitare, The Architectural Review, and Deutsche Bauzeitung. Altogether, the office’s work has been featured in more than 500 publications.
STAR has also exhibited at renowned institutions including Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the NAi—now Het Nieuwe Instituut—in Rotterdam, the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris, and the Ludwig Forum in Aachen.
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Beatriz Ramo
Beatriz Ramo is a Spanish architect, urban designer, and writer based in Rotterdam. She graduated from the Technical School of Architecture in Valencia (ETSAV), Spain. In 2002, she received a scholarship to study at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.
Before founding STAR, she worked for Rem Koolhaas at OMA—Office for Metropolitan Architecture—in Rotterdam, where she participated in projects including the CCTV Headquarters in Beijing and the Wyly Theatre in Dallas.
Beatriz is a recognised critical voice in the field of collective housing, challenging the ongoing standardisation of housing production. Her research and built work advocate for adaptable designs that respond to the diversity and evolving needs of contemporary households—a position through which she has made a significant contribution to the debate on housing quality.
Since 2007, Beatriz Ramo has been a guest lecturer at various architecture, urbanism, and interior design institutions in the Netherlands, including the Academies of Architecture in Amsterdam and Tilburg and the Sandberg Institute. She is regularly invited as a guest critic at European architecture schools, including the Berlage Institute, the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO), Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, and the ACU—Ateliers de Création Urbaine—in Paris.
She has been a jury member for several architecture competitions in France, including Réinventer Paris, as well as in Switzerland, the Netherlands (Europan 15), and Norway, where she chaired the jury for the Europan 12 competition.
Beatriz Ramo has lectured internationally and participated in public debates at leading cultural and academic institutions, including the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine and the Pavillon de l’Arsenal in Paris, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the National Gallery of Art in Vilnius, the SCA in Buenos Aires, LUCA in Luxembourg, ENSA Versailles, the Architecture Club in Kyiv, Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, and the Museum of Architecture in Wrocław.
In 2012, Beatriz Ramo was nominated in the discipline of architecture for the Young Talents in Architecture programme organised by the Rolex Mentor and Protégé Arts Initiative. In 2024, she received the French national ARVHA Women Architects Prize in the Œuvre originale category for the experimental collective housing project START-Ivry in Greater Paris.
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