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





TREE PAVILION





Principal Use: Public Park
Project Site: New York
Total Floor Area: 4,000 sq ft.
Design Period: 2019.11
In the middle of a neighborhood once covered in factories but now a burgeoning hipster town, a small patch of contaminated soil sits within a webwork of busy roads. Bristling up from this roughly five-sided traffic island are numerous grasses, shrubs, and trees—two of which date over a hundred years old, and another belonging to a species that is now hard to find in the city. An environmental site assessment and botanical review have doomed these trees to a slow, eventual death with the added warning that transplantation would carry its own risks and would not guarantee their survival.

In response to the community’s call to action, we have proposed an in-situ solution, intervening in this slow process with the construction of a donor-funded architectural pavilion. The new structure is a two-pronged strategy—one below ground and one above. Below ground, extra-deep foundations form a protective barrier around the site, allowing for the phytoremediation of the contained soil and, in turn, indefinite preservation of the trees. Above ground, an enclosed public park is formed, buffered from the surrounding traffic by a two-story ring of semi-outdoor public rooms. Benefiting from deep foundations the 30-foot-tall outer wall of woven metal fabric achieves a minimum of lateral bracing, relying on its curvature and embedment depth for stability, and asserts a soft yet monolithic presence in the street. The inner walls are contoured in response to the distinctive shape of the traffic island, and are constructed of polished white concrete to ensure a bright, airy atmosphere within the park.

Once a mere backdrop to street traffic, this secret garden of old trees may yet outlive the effects of industrial pollution and accompany the neighborhood through current and future transformations.

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