Thomas Gardner is an architect, designer and educator specializing in community-engaged, material-based design-build practice and serves as Director of the Master of Arts in Social Design graduate program at Maryland Institute College of Art.

His design practice spans from hands-on building and construction to the design of significant public monuments and large buildings in Manhattan, while his research holds a particular focus on drawing, representation, full-scale fabrication, and one-to-one community and material engagement. He is co-founder of HousingOperative, a design-build agency based in Detroit dedicated to the realization of architecture for social and cultural change.

Following his professional degree at the University of Texas at Austin, Thomas worked with a number of leading design studios, including Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects and Steven Holl Architects in New York, as well as Stanley Saitowitz in San Francisco, where he was the project architect for the New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston. He completed his graduate studies at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where his thesis focused on post-industrial urban housing, resulting in the design and construction of the first single-family dwelling in a downtown Detroit neighborhood in over 80 years.

Published and exhibited widely, Thomas has taught architecture and design at Rhode Island School of Design, Parsons The New School for Design and Lawrence Technological University. He has lectured and served as a critic at design schools across the U.S. and internationally, and has led design and building workshops in Paris, Tokyo, Mexico City and Hangzhou, China.

Before joining MICA, he worked with Project H, where he led Studio H, a design-build program for high school students in Berkeley, California.

Thomas lives in Baltimore, Maryland, USA.