"Facts are the essential agents through which the city's constitutive social relations assume comprehensible form. What do I mean by this? For example, Wittgenstein once wrote how the musical thought of a composer could written as notes, sung, played, recorded as groves in a record platter, etc. He held that no one of these forms is the privileged representation of the musical thought; rather each is a homolog of the thought itself. In this sense, homolog forms are entities or phenomenon that demonstrate or exemplify the qualities, value, or structure of an idea.

The city is very similar to Wittgenstein’s conception of music - but instead of a single composing subject, the urban collective generates ideas of social relations. Much like music, the city is a complex entity which assumes many homologous forms, all of which are equally privileged projections of the city's underlying social relations. Public space, commercial architecture, the domestic realm: all of these are materializations of the social basis of the city. Social relations produce the needs to which the city responds. They instigate its activities, its production of space as well as its architectural form."

in: Mark Gilbert, The Facts of the City - Interview mit Nadar Voussigian

mark gilbert architektur is an interdisciplinary practice that combines architecture with urban research and theory. Founded in 1999 by Mark Gilbert, the office seeks to distil the spectacular out of our everyday urban world.

The practice pursues two lines of inquiry. As architectural designers, the office functions as a form factory that transforms contemporary programs into architectural form and - in cooperation with licensed planners - builds within schedule and budget. As urbanists and theoreticians, the practice understands itself as a think tank which challenges prevailing assumptions about program and form.

Mark Gilbert is an architect and urbanist. Born in Schenectady, NY, he studied Mechanical Engineering at the University of Rochester, NY, where he received his Bachelor Degree in 1983. He received a Masters Degree in Architecture in 1990 from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. He has been working for various architecture firms including Santiago Calatrava, Adolf Krischanitz and Michael Loudon. He was Assistant Professor at the Institute for Architectural Theory at the TU Vienna as well as Adjunct Assistant Professor for Theory and Design at the Institute for Architectural Sciences at TU Vienna since 2005. He founded mark gilbert architektur, an interdisciplinary design and research practice in 1999 and has since planned and built numerous projects. Mark Gilbert is co-founder of the non-for-profit institution for urban renewal ArchitekturRaum 5 as well as co-inititaor and organizer of making-it, a series of cultural initiatives in Vienna. He has authored and edited numerous books, urban studies and essays on architecture and urbanism. In 2009 Mark Gilbert founded the interdisciplinary practice for architecture and urbanism trans_city together with Kristian Aulinger and Georg Kogler.