MATTHEW DAVID COOK
Matthew David Cook is an American architect and Brooklyn resident, currently practicing at Hart Howerton in New York City. He is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s five year Bachelor of Architecture program. After a childhood spent drawing the fantastic buildings of his hometown of Chicago, he chose to study architecture and urban design in order to work creatively with and for others on a daily basis. While Matthew loves the aesthetic puzzle of every design, it is the human element of architecture that makes the profession so appealing for him. His work has allowed him to travel often, and from Rome to Bali, from Cuba to the American South, he is most moved by traditional architecture and the story it tells about a people and their history.
In his role as a project manager and architect at Hart Howerton, Matthew leads teams through all phases of design and construction, initiating design concepts and guiding staff through the refinement of those ideas and the development of technical drawings. At Hart Howerton, he has managed or contributed to designs for a wide variety of projects across the United States: a hundred-year plan for a house, barn, and surrounding landscape on a 900-acre grass-fed cattle farm in upstate New York; a revitalization of the oldest commercial structure in Naples, Florida (listed on the National Register of Historic Places) and an accompanying hundred-key hotel; the reconstruction and modernization of a historic home in the Adirondacks destroyed by fire; a $150M LEED Gold condo and club project set in the marshes of South Carolina; and many more. Across all of his projects, Matthew seeks to provide clients with beautiful, durable, and cost-effective solutions that meet the needs of all of a building's users while leaving room for future adaptation.
Prior to joining the team at Hart Howerton, Matthew's work focused on the architecture of the Asia Pacific region; this interest yielded two long-term work experiences abroad. After graduating from Notre Dame, he spent fourteen months working at IBUKU, a bespoke bamboo design-build firm in Bali, Indonesia as one of seventeen Americans selected for the 2014 - 2015 Luce Scholars Program. He then spent two years at Robert A.M. Stern Architects in New York City, working on and learning more about the fascinating process of residential development in China. Eventually, a desire to investigate by going to the source brought Matthew to Beijing, where he spent a year as a project architect at Zephyr Architects (这方建筑师事务所), leading design teams on a variety of residential and office projects throughout China.
Outside of the office, Matthew enjoys cooking for friends, doodling, and playing piano (well) and guitar (poorly). He is also a mildly obsessive birder, a volunteer at New York City's only wildlife rehab center, and a contributor to the New England-based ornithological journal, Bird Observer. When he's sufficiently caffeinated, he can mumble his way through an office environment in French, Italian, and Indonesian. His Chinese, on the other hand, is still mostly a "听不懂" situation.
