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 RISD, UCLA, USC, and Texas Tech, and is an adjunct 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 has served on design juries at UCLA, USC, and Texas Tech, and is an adjunct 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





INSTANT VILLAGE





Principal Use: Gallery & Exhibition Areas, Classrooms, Game Rooms, Cafe
Project Site: Princeton, New Jersey
Total Floor Area: 9,900 sq ft.
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.

Our process, in short, involved zeroing in on key elements of the campus’s Collegiate Gothic style—specifically, the heavy timber gable roof and the quadrangle—and applying to these what we felt were current aesthetic trends (differentiated repetition, a stripping down of traditional forms to their plain-faced geometric basics, and a reversal of inside-outside materiality) in a mash-up of du jour and passé.

The 16 old trees on the site inform the project in specific ways in plan and section. Their measurements and locations were accounted for early on as possible constraints on the building envelope, and, having reached maturity, each could be measured with a good deal of certainty:

  1. Location
  2. Diameter at breast height (DBH)
  3. Diameter at drip line (DDL)
  4. Vertical clearance beneath the lowest branches

While their disposition in plan informs the column layout, their sectional measurements give rise to specific roof profiles that nestle under the branches while maximizing height and pitch angle. Where trees are grouped together, or where their branches are too low to be integrated into the building, areas of the grid are subtracted to form miniature quadrangles bringing light and views into deeper parts of the building. The result is an odd collection of self-similar roof forms, fused together in white.

The interior recalls the warmth of Princeton’s refectories with their massive timber structures and stained wood finishes. Rooms are basically rectangular, and most are connected through an open plan, yet the variations in roof size and shape create a clear spatial hierarchy as well as give each room its own qualities of sound, light, and air.

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