Matt Berman

Matt Berman believes passionately in the transformative power of good design. A founding principal at New York City design + architecture firm Workshop/APD, Berman considers the built environment a player and protagonist in its inhabitants’ lives, with the ability to create a mood and catalyse more meaningful interactions and experiences.

Since the firm’s inception in 1999, he has encouraged clients to demand more of their spaces, creating modern hotels, restaurants, high-end homes, luxury residential developments and institutional projects that engage the senses and invite inquiry at every scale. Today, he leads Workshop/APD’s growing hospitality practice, setting the scene for an ever-changing cast of characters with spaces that are interactive, engaging and intrinsically tied to their unique locations.

Matt’s passion for perfectly imperfect materials and finishes worked by hand, machine or mother nature imbues his work with a timeless, tactile quality and informs the firm’s product development practice. He is known for pursuing technological advances in construction, fabrication, and materials to solve complex design challenges in groundbreaking projects such as Building 92 in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard, and the new 1 Hotel Nashville.

A formative stint at ANY Magazine made Matt acutely aware of the implications of design at every scale, propelling him from architectural journalism to a career in architecture and design. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Lehigh University and a Master of Architecture from Columbia University and has served as a visiting professor at Pratt Institute. Along with Bernard Tschumi he co-edited Index Architecture (MIT Press, 2003), and hosted the original television series What the Window Washer Saw, about the world’s most iconic skyscrapers. Matt co-authored Workshop/APD Homes: Architecture, Interiors and the Spaces Between (Rizzoli, Fall ’22) along with Workshop/APD co-founder Andrew Kotchen and author Marc Kristal. He resides in Brooklyn, NY and Asbury Park, NJ with his husband, Jim, their son, Owen, and their bulldog, Watson.