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Team Member Spotlight: Matthew Radune

Matthew Radune is a licensed Architect who is now in his third year at Henson Architecture. He is now an Associate at the firm. He has a background in Environmental Studies and his goal has always been to work on prototypical projects in sustainability, and his time at Henson Architecture has continued a fulfillment of that goal. He’s a Certified Passive House Designer, having worked on two rowhouse retrofits as well as a new construction single-family house. While it’s still in the early planning stages, the firm is also working on a Net Zero, Passive House development community.

“I met Scott in the Certified Passive House Designer training course and started working at Henson Architecture a year after that. While I’ve worked on Passive House retrofit projects at the firm, I’ve also been challenged to learn a wide array of techniques and strategies for renovating existing and historic buildings, since Preservation is a main focus of the firm. Reducing carbon emissions in New York City is made much easier through the continuing use of its existing building stock, so knowing how to critically and successfully maintain a wide variety of archaic structures here is really paramount to the success of the Climate Mobilization Act and reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions.” As an example, one such project he’s working on involves retrofitting 685 existing 100-year-old galvanized steel windows with high technology Vacuum Insulated Glass, thereby increasing the energy efficiency of the building and saving the historic windows.

Matthew brings to the firm over a decade of residential design experience in small NYC firms, working on townhouse retrofits as well as new houses outside the city. He’s also worked at a much larger scale with experience in master planning and urban design, including sustainability plans and urban codes for multiple international projects, a school campus plan, and cohousing plans. These have focused on pedestrian-friendly, often dense developments that lower the overall carbon emissions and automobile use on-site while increasing shared resources and the permeability of the ground plane.

In 2020 Matthew Radune co-curated one of the most intensive workshops thus far focused on carbon reduction for existing and historic buildings, at the Association for Preservation Technology International’s (APTI) Annual Conference, as a core member of the Zero Net Carbon Collaboration (ZNCC). As a member of AIANY’s Committee On The Environment (COTE) as well as the Historic Building Committee (HBC), he created a bridge between the two in 2019 and has now curated three straight years of an annual panel discussion on the challenges of sustainably retrofitting historic buildings. The first of these events won an award from AIANY.