About — Office Renoso-Urmston

_O-RU focuses on providing Architectural services for private and commercial clients. With vast experiences across sectors, O-RU specialises in Sustainability¹, Essentialism² and Regeneration³.

Whilst our expertise lie in Architecture, our design approach provokes us to engage with all manner of projects. Please get in touch to discuss your project and/or our Capability Statement.

Dan Renoso-Urmston

Architect Director @ Office Renoso-Urmston (O-RU)

PG.Dip.Arch, March (Hons), BSc (Hons), ARB

Dan is an architect and educator focusing on the sustainable regeneration of old market towns. His practice works with public, private and developer clients on a variety of architectural projects. Informed by his academic pursuits within Manchester School of Architecture the practice also has specialisms in environmental design – particularly within residential projects such as luxury homes and general home improvement works (retrofit).

Dan also teaches at the Manchester School of Architecture where he teaches in the AtelierSome Kind of Nature. The manifestos for which reads:

The Some Kind of Nature atelier adopts a post-humanist approach, drawing inspiration from the writings of Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Rosi Braidotti, and others. Our roots lie in feminist posthumanist philosophy. Our primary focus is a response to the ongoing climate crisis, which we consider the greatest challenge facing both the profession and humanity. By embracing a post-humanist framework, we decenter humans and emphasise relationships. This leads to a particular concern with the biodiversity crisis and the inclusion of non-human actors in our design process.
We view all projects as speculative. We employ narrative and speculative design methods to test the boundaries of our imagination and question the present by projecting multiple versions of the future. By adding a temporal lens, we see build structures as spatio-temporal constructs reaching far beyond their external shell into the past and future. This perspective allows us to consider the conditions of the production of architecture and the importance of care and maintenance. Furthermore, we extend care to one another, believing that just architecture cannot be produced in unjust conditions.
We regard demolition, deforestation, and extensive earth modulation as acts of violence, asserting that all energy embedded in the construction process must be accounted for and justified. Our design process is contextual, care-ful, open for multiple, often conflicting voices (Mikhail Bakhtin’s Polyphony) and entangled (Donna Haraway). We are collaborative, transdisciplinary and dialogical. Architecturally speaking, this manifesto translates into a strong focus on context, multifunctional briefs, and an in-depth understanding of tangible expressions of human and non-human relationships expressed through space, materiality, technology, and time.