Meaning of Architecture

Meaning of Architecture

1. The profession of designing buildings, open areas, communities, and other artificial constructions and environments, usually with some regard to aesthetic effect. Architecture often includes design or selection of furnishings and decorations, supervision of construction work, and the examination, restoration, or remodeling of existing buildings.

2. The character or style of building; Romanesque architecture.

3. The action or process of building; construction.

4. The result or product of architectural work, as a building.

5. Buildings collectively.

6. A fundamental underlying design of computer hardware, software, or both.

7. The structure of anything: the architecture of a novel.

The art or science of building; particularly used to differentiate between building and the art of designing buildings. In the latter context, there has been great division of opinion as to what exactly constitutes architecture. The most usual standpoint is typified by Ruskin in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849): ‘Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, for whatsoever uses, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power, and pleasure.’ Pevsner, in An Outline of European Architecture (1943) puts it more succinctly: ‘A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.’ Traditionally, therefore, architecture has tended to concentrate on aspects of higher culture, looking at ennobling buildings such as the Parthenon (Athens) and the Pantheon (Rome), and studying the work of great artist-architects such as Wren and Schinkel. Nevertheless, the practice of architecture in the 19th-c, and especially in the 20th-c, increasingly involved a larger number and variety of often complex skills and disciplines, ranging from the technical considerations of structural engineering, environmental services, and energy conservation, to the functional considerations of room layout, interior design, and human comfort, as well as the overtly intellectual considerations stressed by Ruskin and Pevsner. Correspondingly, there has been a greater acceptance of the wider concerns and domain of architecture as anything which has been consciously, or even unconsciously, designed and built for the use of people.

Architecture, the art of building in which human requirements and construction materials are related so as to furnish practical use as well as an aesthetic solution, thus differing from the pure utility of engineering construction. As an art, architecture is essentially abstract and nonrepresentational and involves the manipulation of the relationships of spaces, volumes, planes, masses, and voids. Time is also an important factor in architecture, since a building is usually comprehended in a succession of experiences rather than all at once. In most architecture there is no one vantage point from which the whole structure can be understood. The use of light and shadow, as well as surface decoration, can greatly enhance a structure.

The analysis of building types provides an insight into past cultures and eras. Behind each of the greater styles lies not a casual trend nor a vogue, but a period of serious and urgent experimentation directed toward answering the needs of a specific way of life. Climate, methods of labor, available materials, and economy of means all impose their dictates. Each of the greater styles has been aided by the discovery of new construction methods. Once developed, a method survives tenaciously, giving way only when social changes or new building techniques have reduced it. That evolutionary process is exemplified by the history of modern architecture, which developed from the first uses of structural iron and steel in the mid-19th cent.

Until the 20th cent, there were three great developments in architectural construction—the post-and-lintel or trabeated system; the arch system, either the cohesive type, employing plastic materials hardening into a homogeneous mass, or the thrust type, in which the loads are received and counterbalanced at definite points; and the modern steel-skeleton system. In the 20th cent, new forms of building have been devised, with the use of reinforced concrete and the development of geodesic and stressed-skin (light material, reinforced) structures.

Reference: reference.com