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





PRESTON PRAYER HALL





Principal Use: House of Worship, Library, Offices
Project Site: Lancashire, England
Total Floor Area: 2,300 sq m.
Design Period: 2021.01
Construction Period: 2022.11-12
Host: Royal Institute of British Architects
This is a new prayer hall for the city of Preston. It has eight sides, four spires, and one giant hole in the roof.

Our approach to the design of this new landmark place of worship, seen in the round up-close and from afar, attempts to merge old, familiar forms with current morphological processes to meet the combined demands of site, program, and the client’s desire for a durable structure with a strong visual identity. As with every project, it is about finding a general approach that is flexible enough to evolve as the project moves forward while retaining clarity of expression.

In looking to the past for inspiration we chose to go local—200 meters from the site, to be exact—where the Church Cottage Museum, an extremely modest building of brick and thatched gable roofs has stood for more than 400 years. Though it lacks the usual traits of a canonical work of architecture, this humble structure, listed on the National Heritage List for England since 1986, is very special in its own way, and has been preserved lovingly for many generations. Awed as we are by Lancashire’s great ecclesiastical buildings, we were interested in the question of how to create a new, original, and recognizable mosque using this modest building as a starting point.

Taking the solid masonry walls and simple gable roofs of the Museum as key formal referents, we used a combination of three gable forms—two small (5m(W) x 8m(H) and 6m x 8m) and one large (10m x 12m)—orienting these toward Mecca and laying them out on the most prominent part of the site at a right angle to each other. The crossing of the large volumes in the middle ensured a centrally located space big enough to accommodate the main prayer hall, with other smaller spaces surrounding it.

Having established a grid on the site we turned our attention to local characteristics—approach, parking, property line, existing trees, views from the M55 motorway, solar orientation, etc... In response to these, we carved away the corners of the grid to create an eight-sided building envelope which, despite its orientation toward Mecca internally, on the outside finds its orientation to the cardinal points and its more immediate situation. Local and global, body and spirit, are expressed in the basic organization.

Topping the prayer hall is not a dome but what we like to think of as the modern day equivalent—a frosted low-E glass skylight that spans 10 meters in both directions with minimal visual clutter. Being the closest thing achievable to nothing at all, this huge hole in the roof can be thought of in much the same way that beautifully crafted domes must have functioned for our ancestors—as a kind of metaphysical device that puts one’s mind beyond the roof, nearer to the dome of heaven.

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