Atelier Cho Thompson: Five Years Later

Feb 05, 2024 By Laura Botham

We check in with Christina Cho Yoo and Ming Thompson, five years after their Anna Hernandez/Luna Textiles award—where are they now, and what has changed?

By Laura Botham Feb 05, 2024

Published in Articles

(Above: The MOCA Workshop, and innovate neighborhood-integrated museum chronicling the Chinese American Experience designed by Atelier Cho Thompson. Image courtesy of Atelier Cho Thompson)

Established in 2016 as a tribute to the late designer’s entrepreneurial spirit and leadership in the textile and interior design industry, the 2024 Anna Hernandez/Luna Textiles Award recognizes woman entrepreneurs and designers with a firm between three and ten years old. The financial and social support during this time for a small business can be crucial, and allow for the business owners to explore new avenues, achieve goals, expand their network and exposure, and much, much more.

It's no surprise that our 2019 awardees, co-founders of the bicoastal Atelier Cho Thompson Ming Thompson, IIDA (New England chapter), AIA, NOMA, and Christina Cho Yoo, AIA, are thriving. The multi-disciplinary design and concept firm based in New Haven Connecticut and San Francisco specializes in the cross-pollination of ideas, concepts, and strategies to create integrated holistic environments.

Within a year of receiving the award, Atelier Cho Thompson opened a storefront space in New Haven, an online store, and produced award-winning work that led to further recognition across the industry and within their communities.Thompson received the 2020 AIA Young Architect Award, and together with Cho Yoo and others co-founded A Rising Tide, an initiative to showcase, elevate, and connect AAPI designers of the built environment.

We wanted to check in with this dynamic duo five years later to hear more about what they’ve achieved and where they are now.

Atelier Cho Thompson founders Ming Thompson (left), and Christina Cho Yoo (right). Image courtesy of Atelier Cho Thompson

What did the Anna Hernandez/Luna Textiles Award help you achieve?

This recognition helped vault us into a new realm in design. The award recognized not only our design work, but our unique business model of combining architecture, interiors, branding, and research, and was the first of a series of national and international awards our firm received. In an industry like architecture and interiors, where female-, minority-, and mother-owned businesses are few and far between, the support that the IIDA and this award have provided has been invaluable. We were so proud to be able to share this award with so many remarkable women over the years, and we encourage young female-owned firms to enter.

What are you most proud of?

We are so proud that we have grown a diverse, dedicated staff with a strong and supportive company culture; we all share the same design ethos, strong drive to stake out new territory, and interest in both conceptual work and boots-on-the-ground construction. Ranging from reimagining the future of the museum, office, home, school, and retail, we've been so blessed with clients who seek innovation and a fresh approach to projects. We’re so lucky to be growing the firm with our incredible colleagues.

Gioia Cafe & Bar, located in the historic neighborhood of Wooster Square in New Haven, Connecticut. Image courtesy of Atelier Cho Thompson

How have you grown as business owners and leaders?

We’ve moved more from design production into design direction, letting our team lead design while keeping an overall view of the big vision, the client relationships, and moving the firm into new typologies. We have also gotten back into teaching after a long hiatus, and the balance between real-world practice and academic exploration is very fruitful for our practice. At Berkeley, Yale, and the California College of Arts, we have taught about leveraging design in a post-pandemic world, the future of retail, work, and the ground floor, ruinophilia, culturally-nuanced adaptive reuse in the city, and community-based design. The most exciting has been when this research feeds back into our projects and takes root in reality.

The award-winning 179 Lincoln Street adaptive reuse project. Image courtesy of Atelier Cho Thompson

The Goodwater Collective is a visionary office space designed for the post-pandemic hybrid workforce. Image courtesy of Atelier Cho Thompson

Why do you love this work?

We feel like the luckiest people in the world. Many of our clients tell us that their time working with us is the most fun they have all week. While our portfolio ranges in typology from public to commercial to residential, all our work is united in a goal to bring people together around joyful experiences from the office to the home to a park. When the pandemic happened and we quickly adapted our designs for a new world, we were further convinced of how crisis brings opportunity and the optimism that is made possible through design. What we do is deeply meaningful for a wide range of people and industries, and we will always seek to push ourselves to leverage design in helping people and organizations adapt to a rapidly changing world.