When viewed together, the three recent renovations of historic buildings in Zadar—the Rector's Palace, the Cedulin Palace, and the Small Arsenal—by Iva Letilović and Igor Pedišić provide us with a possibility of comparison and deeper understanding of the architects' design approach. Programmatically and spatially highly diverse, each of these projects is their recognizable, original work, just like the integration of conservation, interpretation, and intervention with contemporary architectural language is legible in each of them, although each of the tasks was solved by following a significantly different dominant design concept. In the Rector's Palace, a complex historical building was reconciled with a no less complex new program of use by consistently establishing a continuous dialogue between two times—the past and the present—in one space. The Small Arsenal is primarily a play of reality and illusion, which to some extent is present in each renovation, while in the Cedulin Palace, the new function is expressed through the topic of a house within a house.

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