Mark leads WILDING X, the landscape architecture practice at WHY Architecture. Prior to joining WHY, Mark was a partner and landscape design director with Balmori Associates.

His ability to lead conceptual design, development and management is evidenced in numerous international award winning projects and strategic plans, including the Campa de los Ingleses Park at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the Masterplan and vision for Public Administration Town, a new administrative city of Sejong, Korea, the Gabon Conference Center and Gardens in Gabon, Africa with Work Architecture Company, as well as the competition winning Rebuild By Design project “Resist, Delay, Store, Discharge” with OMA for a comprehensive strategy for a resilient and sustainable Hoboken, NJ. His works also reveals the collaborative potential of landscape, ecology and art in SKYLANDING; with Yoko Ono; Skid Rows; Queens Museum Artist Gardens, 2005 with Brian Tolle and the construction and interpretation of Robert Smithson’s Floating Island; 2005 for Minetta Brook and the Whitney Museum.

Mark studied politics and conflict studies before pursuing a greater social good and received his MLA in Landscape Architecture and Regional Design from the University of Pennsylvania (1999). He previously worked with Ken Smith Landscape Architect (NY) and Ohtori Consultants (Japan). He has had faculty appointments at University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design, Yale Architecture School and Columbia GSAPP, teaching design studios that explore our ecological future and has been a studio critic, guest reviewer and lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, University of Toronto, Cornell University, Columbia University, Princeton University, the ASLA Awards, and Mildred’s Lane. He has participated as an invited juror for several international competitions abroad.

He is the author, with Diana Balmori, of Master Plan for the Sejong Public Administration Town; Topos; 60, 2007 and his work is featured in numerous publications and books, including, A Landscape Manifesto, Drawing and Reinventing Landscape, by Diana Balmori, Forum for Urban Design publication, Next New York, which highlights forty proposals imagining rebuilt infrastructure, reformed government, and an animated public realm for New York City; and Transects: 100 Years of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the School of Design of the University of Pennsylvania.

Professional Landscape Architecture Licensure: New Jersey, New York, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, Texas, Maine, Ontario

Education

University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts Masters in Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning Philadelphia, PA, 1999

Harvard Graduate School of Design Landscape Architecture Summer Program Cambridge, MA 1995

College of the Holy Cross Bachelor of Political Science & Peace & Conflict Studies Worcester, MA, 1995

Faculty

University of Pennsylvania School of Design Department of Landscape Architecture Faculty, 2010-2018 Columbia University

Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation Department of Architecture Adjunct Assistant Professor, 2012- 2015

Yale University School of Architecture Studio Critic, 2010 Podcast Wild & Us. GoodGeist.

Fellowships

Magic Grant/ Design Fellow /Columbia Journalism School/The Brown Institute for Media Innovation

Mapping Monuments & Memory (2015-2016)

Podcast

https://goodgeist.buzzsprout.com/2258149/episodes/15848547-wild-us-with-mark-thomann