ARCHITECTURE DEFINED

Architecture

1. The art or practice of designing and constructing buildings.

2. The style in which a building is designed and constructed.

Architecture is a language that we understand because we inhabit buildings, they surround us and create our world. To achieve a piece of architecture requires engaging with a process of thinking, drawing and designing, a process that ultimately produces a building. This process begins with an idea or ‘concept’ that relates to a particular site or context. It further develops (through a ‘brief ’) into a ‘form’, which will have functions or activities associated with it. This form is then further developed structurally (as a frame or system), and materially (with a ‘skin’ or ‘wrapping’). It is finally realised, framing experiences of light, sound, space. The etymology of the word ‘architecture’ can be defined as arkhi meaning chief and tekton meaning builder or  SECC Conference Centre, Glasgow, Scotland carpenter. This definition demonstrates the fundamental basis of architecture. As chief builder an architect needs to have an overview of building, both as an object produced and as an activity of construction. This overview requires an understanding of the context of buildings (which can be a landscape or the city, or somewhere in between), and an understanding of the building itself, in terms of its underlying concept or idea, its functions or uses and its materiality and structure. This overview, however, exists at many levels and the next stage of understanding of building is as a series of rooms, connected spaces that lead from the outside in. Further consideration is the control of light and sound in those rooms and the furniture that inhabits the spaces. The architect is a designer whose remit ranges from the large scale of designing a city to the smaller scale of designing a chair.

SECC Conference Centre, Glasgow, Scotland