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Yichen RenHis award-winning practice spans affordable housing and adaptive reuse, bringing professional rigor, material restraint and social purpose to the interrelated issues of care, memory and continuity.
New York-based architect-designer Yicheng Ren works in two closely related fields: affordable housing and adaptive reuse. Trained in interior architecture, she approaches architecture as an active social instrument, able to organize care, extend the life of heritage structures and shape new forms of collective living through spatial strategy and material containment.
Ren holds a Master of Design in Interior Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts in Interior Design from the University of Edinburgh. Her work has been recognized through a series of international competition results and publications linked to three award-winning design proposals. For Under ONE Roof, it received platinum honors in 2025 from the Houzee Awards in Affordable Housing and Multi-Family Housing, as well as a platinum honor from the Architecture & Design Collection Awards in Residential House Design. Her proposal for adaptive reuse Tre-Atriums received an Honorable Mention in TerraViva Competitions – Rural Housing (2023) and was later published in TerraViva Chronicles No. 1 (2024). Her project Dwelling in Time was named a Finalist in the TerraViva – The Venetian Villa (2025) competitions and received numerous recognitions in 2025, including gold distinctions from the Better Future Design Awards and Design Discovery Awards, along with awards from the MUSE Design Awards, New York Architectural Design Awards, London Design Awards, and London Design Awards. He has also been invited to serve as a judge for the INSPIRELI Awards in 2025 and the A’ Design Awards in 2026. Together, these results show consistent recognition in housing and adaptive reuse competitions, publications and peer review platforms.
A practice based on care and continuity
In these projects, Wren’s work is organized around two separate but connected trajectories: Affordable Housing and Socially Responsive Collective Living and Adaptive Reuse through Architectural Interior Transformation. A track addresses contemporary social vulnerability through housing. the other works with historical fabric, material memory and reuse of legacy structures. What connects them is a fixed architectural position: that design can mediate between care, memory and collective future.
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This consistency is visible not through stylistic repetition, but through method. Ren repeatedly works through collective spatial cores, preserved surfaces, calibrated movement sequences and limited material palettes that allow older structures to remain legible. In any case, the work is not just about form, but how people inhabit, share, remember and move through space.
Affordable housing beyond the shelter
This position is particularly clear in Under ONE Roof, an award-winning individual competition proposal developed for three vulnerable single-mother families. Rather than treating affordability as a purely economic issue, the project treats it as a spatial and social condition. The proposal brings three households into a single timber-framed volume, using timber construction to reduce costs, improve sustainable performance and create a peaceful domestic atmosphere.
As the sole author of the project, Wren developed the complete design framework of the proposal, including the concept of collective living, spatial organization, material strategy and care scenario. Its most distinctive contribution lies in its Raumplan-inspired organization, which creates visual continuity on all levels while maintaining privacy between households. Communal kitchens and communal living spaces are at the center of the home, allowing mothers to cook, work and care for children at the same time. This arrangement supports a rotating childcare system in which one resident can supervise all children while others pursue work or education.
The project was recognized in several categories in 2025, including platinum honors for affordable and multi-family housing and additional honors in Residential Design, Residential Architecture and Residential Interior Design. This range of recognition reflects the project’s hybrid power: it functions simultaneously as housing typology, internal strategy and social context. Under ONE Roof does not present communal living as a compromise. Instead, it proposes a spatial model in which affordability is inseparable from dignity, visibility and shared action.
Under ONE Roof Project Presentation at Providence City Hall, Providence, RI, 2023 © Yicheng Ren
Adaptive Reuse and Heritage Renewal
Wren’s second major focus is adaptive reuse, where her training in interior architecture becomes central to how historic structures are reinterpreted. Both Tre-Atriums and Dwelling in Time are award-winning group competition proposals, but in each case Ren’s role was linked to the project’s reuse logic, conservation strategy and internal architectural transformation.
At Tre-Atriums, developed for the historic Cascina Lossano in Italy’s Po Valley, the proposal transforms a run-down agricultural structure into a rural community of nine homes. Within the team, Ren was the member with the strongest adaptive reuse background and led the parts of the proposal that dealt with the relationship between the old structure and the new intervention. Her role included the internal architectural concept based on reuse, the integration of conservation with domestic habitation and the material strategy that shaped the internal character of the project.
At the center of the proposal are three interconnected atriums, inserted into the existing fabric as shared spaces that bring daylight, air and collective life back into the building. Ren also led the interior material approach that allowed the historic structure to remain legible: weathered brickwork was retained rather than refinished, while CLT load-bearing walls, concrete supports, selective metal fasteners and restrained wood finishes were introduced in a way that clarified the new intervention without overwhelming the old fabric. This proposal received an Honorable Mention in TerraViva’s 2023 Rural Housing competition and was later published in TerraViva Chronicles No. 1 in 2024. The significance of the project lies not only in the transformation of a Cascina that degrades into nine houses organized around three social patios, but also in the way it is adapted to a rural environment. keep.
Wren’s role becomes even more pronounced in Dwelling in Time, a group competition proposal developed for Villa Meneghetti near Venice. The project was recognized as a Finalist in the TerraViva Competitions – The Venetian Villa (2025) and subsequently received multiple awards in the adaptive reuse, conservation, hospitality and design categories, including gold distinctions from the Better Future New York and European Design Awards. Drawing on her familiarity with historic architectural preservation projects and the interpretive logic required in adaptive reuse projects, Wren shaped the overall strategic direction of the project. Within the site, the most historically valuable building required careful maintenance and interior transformation, and she led this part of the proposal completely.
Within the team, Ren led the strategic adaptation of interior spaces and interior architecture, focusing on the treatment of interior facades and wooden ceilings as architectural objects. Instead of covering the weathered walls with cosmetic restoration, it preserves the age and patina as part of the spatial experience. A restrained palette of lime plaster and reclaimed timber allows the historic walls to breathe while introducing warmth and tactile continuity. He also led the conservation approach to the interior facade, timber ceiling treatment, screen design, furniture selection and material palette development that shaped the project’s conservation-minded internal identity.
By connecting wine retail, tasting, dining, guest accommodation and seasonal outdoor living through a single choreographed route, the project achieves a high level of programmatic control within a tightly constrained historic space. More importantly, it turns adaptive reuse into an experiential practice in which visitors don’t just observe history, but move through it, inhabit it, and encounter it through material, light, and sequence. Dwelling in Time demonstrates the maturity of Ren’s approach: preservation without nostalgia, intervention without erasure.
Towards an Architecture of Care, Memory and Continuity
Taken together, Under ONE Roof, Tre-Atriums and Dwelling in Time define the common ground in Ren’s practice. In affordable housing and adaptive reuse, he works at two scales simultaneously: the social systems that shape everyday life and the architectural systems that shape how buildings withstand time.
The continuation in the three sentences is specific. In Under ONE Roofarchitecture is used to support collective care through spatial organization. At Tre-Atriums, adaptive reuse becomes a way of reconnecting rural heritage with community life. In Dwelling in Time, preservation and internal transformation are used to make historical memory habitable rather than remote. In all three, Ren’s role is clearest where architecture meets use: in domestic organization, material selection, conservation strategy, and the transformation of legacy structures into spaces that can sustain modern life.
Her work has been recognized through competition results, category awards, publications and invitations to participate in international award committees. Equally important, the projects demonstrate a consistent disciplinary focus. Rather than moving between unrelated subjects, Wren has created a body of work that repeatedly returns to questions of care, reuse, and continuity, using interior architecture not as an afterthought, but as the context through which buildings are socially and historically redefined.
As current architectural debates continue to address the precarity of housing, the abandonment of the countryside, and the future of the historic fabric, these proposals place Ren in a field of designers working on these challenges with methodological precision and a well-defined point of view. More than proposing new buildings, he uses architecture to test how care, memory and continuity can be spatialized.
Words by DSCENE Features Editor Maya Lane
