Gold Winner of the International Architecture & Design Awards 2026

Dwelling In Time

Architecture

Renovation, Restoration & Adaptive Reuse

Concept / Professional Category

Architect / Designer:

Yicheng Ren

Design Team:

Jianing Yang, Yicheng Zhang, Xinyi Yue

Copyright:

Yicheng Ren, Jianing Yang, Yicheng Zhang, Xinyi Yue

Country:

United States

In the quiet countryside of Campocroce, where the rhythms of agriculture once harmonized with Venetian retreat, Villa Meneghetti stands not as a monument but as a memory in suspension. “Dwelling in Time” reframes this fragmented landscape not through erasure or preservation, but through grafting – a careful stitching of architecture, time, and terrain into a new spatial and seasonal narrative.

At its core is a promenade – a connective thread that moves through, between, and around the existing buildings. Neither axial nor ornamental, it is choreographic: a path of rhythm and lightness composed of glazed corridors, bronze thresholds, and minimalist white stone facades. This quiet infrastructure links wine shop, tasting room, restaurant, and boutique hotel into a continuous yet varied procession.

The villa’s facades are treated not as blank surfaces but as textured relics – framed and protected by new colonnades and transparent enclosures. These additions do not overwrite the past; they hold it in tension, creating a living archive where space carries the imprint of weather and time.

This is not a singular gesture but a system of restrained, reciprocal acts – between inside and outside, past and present, guest and host. The logic follows path – node­frame – sequence, offering architecture not as spectacle, but as experience. Through this grafted rhythm of old and new, the villa becomes an inhabited landscape, where time is not restored – but spatialized.