Yicheng Ren’s award-winning practice spans affordable housing and adaptive reuse, bringing professional rigor, material restraint, and social purpose to the intertwined questions of care, memory, and continuity.
New York–based architectural designer Yicheng Ren works across two closely related areas: affordable housing and adaptive reuse. Trained in interior architecture, she approaches architecture as an active social instrument, one that can organize care, extend the life of inherited structures, and shape new forms of collective living through spatial strategy and material restraint.
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 tied to three award-winning design proposals. For Under ONE Roof, she received Platinum distinctions in 2025 from the Houzee Awards in Affordable Housing and Multi-Family Housing, as well as a Platinum distinction from the Architecture & Design Collection Awards in Residential House Design. Her adaptive reuse proposal 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 TerraViva Competitions – The Venetian Villa (2025) and went on to receive multiple recognitions in 2025, including Gold distinctions from the Better Future Design Awards and the Design Discovery Awards, along with awards from the MUSE Design Awards, New York Architectural Design Awards, London Design Awards, and IDA Design Awards. She has also been invited to serve as a juror for the INSPIRELI Awards in 2025 and the A’ Design Awards in 2026. Together, these results show consistent recognition across housing and adaptive reuse competitions, publications, and peer-review platforms.
A Practice Grounded in Care and Continuity
Across these projects, Ren’s work is organized around two distinct yet connected trajectories: Affordable Housing & Socially Responsive Collective Living, and Adaptive Reuse through Interior Architectural Transformation. One trajectory addresses contemporary social vulnerability through housing; the other works with historical fabric, material memory, and the reuse of inherited structures. What links them is a consistent architectural position: that design can mediate between care, memory, and collective futures.
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That consistency is visible not through stylistic repetition, but through method. Ren repeatedly works through collective spatial cores, preserved surfaces, calibrated sequences of movement, and restrained material palettes that allow older structures to remain legible. In each case, the project is not simply about form, but about how people inhabit, share, remember, and move through space.
Affordable Housing Beyond Shelter
This position is especially 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 financial issue, the project addresses it as a spatial and social condition. The proposal brings three households into a single wood-framed volume, using timber construction to reduce cost, improve sustainable performance, and create a calm domestic atmosphere.
As the sole author of the project, Ren developed the proposal’s full design framework, including its collective living concept, spatial organization, material strategy, and caregiving scenario. Its most distinctive contribution lies in its Raumplan-inspired organization, which creates visual continuity across levels while preserving privacy between households. Shared kitchens and communal living spaces are positioned at the center of the house, allowing mothers to cook, work, and care for children simultaneously. This arrangement supports a rotational childcare system in which one resident can supervise all children while others pursue work or education.
The project was recognized across multiple categories in 2025, including Platinum distinctions for Affordable Housing and Multi-Family Housing and additional honors in Residential House Design, Household Architecture, and Interior Residential Design. That range of recognition reflects the project’s hybrid strength: it operates simultaneously as a housing typology, an interior strategy, and a social framework. Under ONE Roof does not present collective living as compromise. Instead, it proposes a spatial model in which affordability is inseparable from dignity, visibility, and shared agency.
Under ONE Roof Project Presentation at Providence City Hall, Providence, RI, 2023 © Yicheng Ren
Adaptive Reuse and the Renewal of Heritage
Ren’s second major direction is adaptive reuse, where her training in interior architecture becomes central to the way historical structures are reinterpreted. Both Tre-Atriums and Dwelling in Time are award-winning group competition proposals, but in each case Ren’s role was tied to the project’s reuse logic, preservation strategy, and interior architectural transformation.
In Tre-Atriums, developed for the historic Cascina Lossano in Italy’s Po Valley, the proposal transforms a deteriorating agricultural structure into a rural community of nine housing units. Within the team, Ren was the member with the strongest adaptive reuse background, and she led the parts of the proposal that addressed the relationship between the old structure and the new intervention. Her role included the reuse-based interior architectural concept, the integration of preservation with domestic inhabitation, and the material strategy that shaped the project’s interior character.
At the center of the proposal are three interconnected atriums, inserted into the existing fabric as shared voids 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 preserved rather than refinished, while CLT load-bearing walls, concrete supports, selective metal connectors, 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 Rural Housing competition in 2023 and was later published in TerraViva Chronicles No. 1 in 2024. The project’s significance lies not only in its conversion of one deteriorating Cascina into nine homes organized around three social atriums, but also in the way it frames adaptive reuse as a model for rural continuity rather than static preservation.
Ren’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 TerraViva Competitions – The Venetian Villa (2025) and subsequently received multiple awards across adaptive reuse, preservation, hospitality, and design categories, including Gold distinctions from the Better Future New York and European Design Awards. Drawing on her familiarity with historical architectural preservation projects and the interpretive logic required in adaptive reuse projects, Ren shaped the project’s overall strategic direction. Within the site, the most historically valuable building required careful preservation and interior transformation, and she led that portion of the proposal in full.
Within the team, Ren led the interior adaptation and interior architectural strategy, focusing on the treatment of interior façades and timber ceilings as architectural artifacts. Rather than covering weathered walls with cosmetic restoration, she preserves age and patina as part of the spatial experience. A restrained palette of lime plaster and reclaimed timber allows historic walls to breathe while introducing warmth and tactile continuity. She also led the interior façade preservation approach, timber ceiling treatment, screen design, furniture selection and the development of the material palette that shaped the project’s preservation-led interior identity.
By linking wine retail, tasting, dining, guest accommodations, and seasonal outdoor life through a single choreographed route, the project achieves a high level of programmatic control within a tightly constrained historic site. More importantly, it turns adaptive reuse into an experiential practice in which visitors do not simply observe history, they 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.
Toward 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. Across affordable housing and adaptive reuse, she works on two scales at once: the social systems that shape everyday life, and the architectural systems that shape how buildings endure through time.
The continuity across the three proposals is concrete. In Under ONE Roof, architecture is used to support collective care through spatial organization. In Tre-Atriums, adaptive reuse becomes a way to reconnect rural heritage with community life. In Dwelling in Time, preservation and interior transformation are used to make historical memory inhabitable rather than remote. Across all three, Ren’s role is clearest where architecture meets use: in domestic organization, material selection, preservation strategy, and the conversion of inherited structures into spaces that can sustain contemporary life.
Her work has been recognized through competition results, category-based distinctions, publication, and invitations to serve on international award juries. Just as importantly, the projects show a consistent disciplinary focus. Rather than moving between unrelated themes, Ren has built a body of work that repeatedly returns to questions of care, reuse, and continuity, using interior architecture not as an afterthought, but as the framework through which buildings are socially and historically redefined.
As current architectural debates continue to address housing precarity, rural abandonment, and the future of historic fabric, these proposals place Ren within a field of designers working through those challenges with methodological precision and a clearly defined point of view. More than proposing new buildings, she is using architecture to test how care, memory, and continuity can be made spatial.
Words by DSCENE Features Editor Maya Lane
