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CHO & URANO

PROJECTS

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INDEX



ABOUT:
Cho & Urano is an architecture firm in Salt Lake City, Utah providing a full scope of services on projects of various types and sizes, and engaging in architectural research through experiments and theoretical projects.

We started in 2020 after winning an international competition with our project House for Our Mothers. Prior to that we worked in offices in Los Angeles, Beijing, Seoul, San Francisco, and New York.

We approach each project as a continuing investigation into relationships between architecture, structure, and landscape, using sketches, models, and collected images.

Our research has touched on a variety of subjects, including houses, housing, urban design, and infrastructure. It has been exhibited in Seoul, Los Angeles, and New York, as well as at the International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam, and has been published internationally in A+U, Shinkenchiku, and others.


BIO:
HANSONG CHO, AIA
hansong@chourano.com
Hansong Cho received a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Seoul and a Master of Architecture from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. She has managed numerous residential and cultural projects in New York for the offices of Kyle May, Toshihiro Oki, and Julian von der Schulenburg. Her personal work has been exhibited at the International Architecture Biennale in Rotterdam, the Hunter East Harlem Gallery in New York, and was featured in a retrospective exhibition of Columbia University’s best housing projects produced over a 40-year period. She has served on design juries at Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Southern California, and Texas Tech University, and is an associate instructor at the University of Utah School of Architecture. Hansong is a licensed architect in the State of Utah.


SASHA URANO
sasha@chourano.com
Sasha Urano grew up in Honolulu and Salt Lake City. He holds a BA in Architectural Studies from UCLA, where he graduated with distinction, and a Master of Architecture from Princeton University. He has worked in a number of offices in the U.S. and Asia including Jones Partners Architecture, MAD, Mass Studies, and IDEO. Prior to co-founding Cho & Urano he spent four years as a project architect at Levenbetts in New York where he managed, among other things, a winning competition proposal for a public sculpture in Lower Manhattan and the renovation of a public library in Brooklyn. He is an associate instructor at the University of Utah School of Architecture.


NEWS:
  • Center for Bees featured in the Salt Lake Tribune, May 2023
  • Cho & Urano Receive Honorable Mention in Namdo Righteous Army History Museum Competition, 2022
  • House with a Corner Eave Wins Runner-Up Prize in Empowered Living Design Competition, 2021
  • Three Wall House and House with a Corner Eave Exhibited at AIA Utah Empowered Living Design Awards Ceremony, 2021
  • Salt Lake City Office Opened, June 2021
  • House for Our Mothers Published in A+U No. 592
  • House for Our Mothers Published in Shinkenchiku 2020:01
  • House for Our Mothers Awarded First Prize in Shinkenchiku Residential Design Competition, 2020





RANDOM IMAGE


OFFICE PHOTO:

Office


CONTACT:
Cho & Urano
360 W BROADWAY #228
Salt Lake City, UT 84101

T: 801 895 2002
E: office@chourano.com
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28 MATTHES HOUSE
HOUSE, 2023
A series of custom wood furnishings for a historic 1,000 sq ft. brick cottage, designed to resolve eccentricities of the 1890’s interior while adding much needed storage, seating, and work surfaces throughout.
PERMALINK
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33 CENTER FOR BEES
COMPETITION, 2023
An everything center built on the former Salt Lake Bees stadium site, dedicated to the mascot of not only the baseball team but of the entire Beehive State, a community of people so industrious and social as to compare themselves to a colony of insects.
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27 FILM & DANCE STUDIOS
OFFICE, (IN PROGRESS)
A video production company headquarters designed to reflect the character of its more manufacturing-oriented neighbors as well as the active railroad line on which it abuts.
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31 NAMDO MUSEUM
COMPETITION, 2022
A museum dedicated to the Righteous Army, a civilian militia credited with defending Korea against numerous invasions throughout its history.
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25 HOUSE FOR OUR MOTHERS-IN-LAW
PROJECT, 2021
This housing proposal takes its name from the mother-in-law unit, also known as an accessory dwelling unit or ADU.
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23 HOUSE WITH A CORNER EAVE
COMPETITION, 2021
This house, tiny though it may be, has an inside that feels comfortable and varied despite its small footprint.
**These plans have been pre-approved by Salt Lake City. Contact us to get started.**
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20 CROOK POINT BRIDGE
COMPETITION, 2020
A public park formed from the selective modification of an abandoned railroad tunnel and landmark drawbridge on the Seekonk River in Providence, Rhode Island.
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18 COFFEE TABLE
FURNITURE, 2020
A coffee table made from a discarded slab of granite.
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16 TREE PAVILION
PROJECT, 2020
An architectural pavilion for a five-sided traffic island, designed as an in-situ strategy for preserving a cluster of rare trees threatened by industrial pollution.
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13 HEADBOARD
FURNITURE, 2020
A study in aggressively low-cost custom furniture-making using materials bought and cut at the local lumberyard (for a dollar a cut) and assembled by the client using a screwdriver.
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11 LIGHTNING ENGINE
PROJECT, 2016
This conceptual proposal explores the intersection of architecture, megastructures, and weather through the creation of electrical storms.
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9 HARLEM RIVER APARTMENTS
PROJECT, 2016
Based on a parody of the “1909 Theorem” cartoon in Delirious New York, this theoretical project for apartment housing uses gardens, galleries, and platforms as a way to fine-tune the boundaries between private and shared domestic space, and seeks to create healthy social interactions between households both vertically and horizontally through the use of three apartment types.
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7 CSOQB
PROJECT, 2015
A radical vision for a heavily polluted five-mile stretch of New York’s East River, dumping ground for 139 combined sewer overflows (C.S.O.’s), wherein the city begins a slow process of expansion into the river through new construction methods applied at the convergence of a number of social and economic forces.
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5 HOUSE FOR TWO ARTISTS
COMPETITION, 2013
In this house two artists are free to shape their own space using partitions that slide and rotate on gridded tracks in the floor and ceiling.
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3 LOOP HOUSE
PROJECT, 2012
In this project we explored an alternative formal strategy for a single-family house with an emphasis on the house itself and the objects inside it. Taking the wall as the house’s primary tectonic element, we attached to it all the fixtures and furnishings of a family of four—each implying spatial needs such as floor area, clearances, adjacencies, and privacy—and contoured the wall on radial curves to fit within a legally allowable zoning envelope.
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1 HOUSE IN EAGLE ROCK
PROJECT, 2012
This study considers a medium-density strategy for an unbuilt flag-shaped lot partially surrounding the client’s cottage, which occupies the smaller lot to the east. The house comprises a single wall that is contoured to fit between the dense formation of trees, capturing a narrow, two-story-high pocket of space and punctuated by enormous windows. It attempts to synthesize the site’s chief characteristics—north-facing slope, dense tree growth, elevated canopy—with an architectural enclosure flexible enough to accommodate two or three households in a variety of configurations.
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32 NARMI MASTER PLAN
COMPETITION, 2022
A master plan for the New Agricultural Resources Management Institute (N.A.R.M.I.) in Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Korea, loosely based on the Roman planning convention of ‘cardo’ and ‘decumanus,’ and integrating indoor storage, seed production, and office spaces with outdoor drying fields and machinery circulation paths.
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29 THOMAS HOUSE
HOUSE, (IN PROGRESS)
The needs of a growing family of seven prompted this residential addition, which includes a new kitchen, office, library, outdoor deck, and spa patio, designed as riffs on the original tract house’s vernacular.
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24 THREE WALL HOUSE
PROJECT, 2021
To build this ADU (accessory dwelling unit), four triangular structural modules are laid sideways and packed together to serve as the formwork for three concrete walls, then removed through the open fourth side and recombined to become the roof structure.
**These plans have been pre-approved by Salt Lake City. Contact us to get started.**
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22 PRESTON PRAYER HALL
COMPETITION, 2021
This is a new prayer hall for the city of Preston. It has eight sides, four spires, and one giant hole in the roof.
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21 416 MEMORIAL
COMPETITION, 2021
A cultural park consisting of exhibition and educational facilities and a columbarium to commemorate the victims of the Sewol ferry disaster of 16 April 2014.
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19 GREAT SALT LAKE STATE PARK
PROJECT, 2021
This is a speculative proposal for the Great Salt Lake State Park, an existing park with a yacht club and marina that are under threat of obsolescence due to the lake’s ever-changing water levels and annual droughts.
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17 HOUSE FOR OUR MOTHERS
COMPETITION, 2020
Winning competition entry based on the idea that many of the future's challenges can be solved through big-family living.
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15 YEOUI NARU FERRY TERMINAL
COMPETITION, 2020
A ferry terminal on Seoul's Han River shaped to accommodate five 700-ton boats while resolving three misaligned grids from the harbor and park nearby.
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14 LIFEGUARD TOWER
COMPETITION, 2020
Restoration and extension of a disused beach lifeguard tower.
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12 HOT MODELS, COLD BUILDINGS
INSTALLATION, 2016
A design thesis exploring the interplay between heat, air, and architectonic form using non-digital methods, exhibited at Princeton University School of Architecture.
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10 TOKYO OLYMPIC PARK
PROJECT, 2016
Conceived amid the fiasco surrounding Zaha Hadid Architects’ competition entry for the New National Stadium, the objective of this theoretical proposal was to explore radically different alternatives to the traditionally un-compact and inflexible Olympic park type. Our approach was to design the park as a dynamic landscape that could accommodate a number of events whose footprints would normally exceed a site of this size, but through careful programming and experimental technology could adapt to different needs at different times.
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8 HOUSE B
PROJECT, 2015
Thousands of houses along New Jersey’s coastline are on what used to be zoned as wetlands but have recently been “upgraded” to high-risk flood zones in light of climate model predictions and the damage wreaked by Hurricane Sandy. This study takes much the same approach that local homebuilders have taken, which is to accept the ground as wetlands and to raise the entire house by 11 feet. Where it diverges, however, is in its reconfiguration of basic elements of the suburban American house as a consequence of detachment from the ground.
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6 INSTANT VILLAGE
PROJECT, 2014
Few university campuses express the spirit and values of scholarship quite like Princeton’s, insulated as it is from the outside world since before the nation’s founding. Together, the architecture, medieval pageantry, regalia, Latin phrases carved in stone—all combine to produce an other-timely atmosphere. As we see it, the challenge of conceiving any new building here—in this case, one dedicated to the study of art and architecture—lies in balancing expectations of newness on the one hand and deference to tradition on the other.
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4 CHUNGMURO PRINT TOWN
PROJECT, 2013
This proposal for the Chungmuro bookmaking quarter in Seoul seeks to bring new life to an aging industrial neighborhood following on the global trend of the renewed urban arts district. But it does so with an almost reluctantly light touch, attempting to elude the visitor’s attention and recede into the background through the maximal use of existing elements, a minimal addition of new materials, and the visual concealment of only the most obsolete parts.
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2 JINA
SCULPTURE, 2012
A proposal for a temporary architectural pavilion inspired by a BMW concept car and designed with computer simulations of hair blowing in the wind.
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