Architecture...

When someone searches architecture in a dictionary or a website online, the general definition will say something similar to “the profession of designing buildings, open areas, communities, and other artificial constructions and environments, usually with some regard to aesthetic effect.” This is the first definition for the word “architecture” on dictionary.com. Six different definitions follow the initial one and five of them have the word building in it. It was my natural instinct to go online to dictionary.com to search the word when my class was asked to answer the question, “What is architecture?” I have completed seven semesters filled with exposure to what we all call architecture but in reality, what is architecture? Architecture has, ultimately in our society, become something not fully related to buildings, but something more…

Anybody can instantly find an already adapted answer to the word architecture by simply logging onto the internet and typing the word but so much more lies behind that word. Architecture has become such a malleable idea where several meanings have been adapted. While there may have been a time when buildings were the primary intention of idea, is it not the only architecture anymore. There are times where a computer engineer will use the word to imply his design of a particular program. Ultimately, and as strange as it sounds, the computer engineer is correct in his use of the word because, with my personal perspective of the word, architecture is the “designing of…”

The three dots that follow my perspective of architecture are very relevant: they express an opinion that resembles an option. This option is what man would like to think of architecture. My take on the idea strongly believes that architecture is the designing of anything. I believe that architecture is not a concrete idea but one that can change from profession to profession and even interest to interest. As the great Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “Architecture is that great living creative spirit which from generation to generation, from age to age, proceeds, persists, creates, according to the nature of man, and his circumstances as they change.”