architecture

Monday, December 6, 2004

What is "architecture"?

My once a day Google alert for "architecture" today yielded ten results (about average) with absolutely none of them related to the common use of the word, building design (definitely below average). Instead, the automated search yielded the following:

NitroSecurity today announced its Integrated Switched-Infrastructure Security (ISIS) architecture, a new enterprise-wide security model that is the ...



CipherTrust, the leader in messaging security, today announced the Enterprise Messaging Security Architecture (EMSA) Alliance, an open, industry-wide ...



Jaguar plans common architecture for XJ and next S-Type models...information on the £80m savings planned by the closure of Browns Lane car assembly, an FT report of 2 December suggests a common architecture for Jaguar's ...



HP and Sun Microsystems should take note. Oracle has announced its "architecture of the future," and HP and Sun have been left off the plans. ...



IBM, Sony and Toshiba last week said they had booted up a prototype workstation based on the high-performance Cell processor architecture they are jointly ...



The multi-tiered architecture separates the CAD application's user interface from its core modeling engine, or design server, and data storage, facilitating ...



and so forth ...





I'm definitely not surprised that the term "architecture" would be used heavily for computer and information technology, "the manner in which the components of a computer or computer system are organized and integrated" being the fifth definition of the word in Merriam-Webster Online. It's the structure of the components that justifies the term here, though structure is only one part of "architecture" when applied to building design, meaning their borrowing of the term only looks at a limited portion of it.



So what am I getting at here? I don't know exactly. It seems like there's a lot of other professions and other parts of society that like to borrow and, in a sense, redefine "architecture". Maybe architects just need to be aware of that, and potentially rethink what architecture is and what it can become.

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