Beautiful Architecture

Chapter 1. What Is Architecture?

John Klein

David Weiss

Introduction

Builders, musicians, writers, computer designers, network designers, and software developers all use the term architecture, as do others (ever hear of a food architect?), yet each produces different results. A building is very different from a symphony, but both have architectures. Further, all architects talk about beauty in their work and its results. A building architect might say that a building should provide an environment suitable for working or living, and that it should be beautiful to behold; a musician that the music should be playable, with a discernible theme, and that it should be beautiful to the ear; a software architect that the system should be friendly and responsive to the user, maintainable, free of critical errors, easy to install, reliable, that it should communicate in standard ways with other systems, and that it, too, should be beautiful.

This book provides you with detailed examples of beautiful architectures drawn from the fields of computerized systems, a relatively young discipline. Because we are young, we have fewer examples to emulate than fields such as building, music, or writing, and therefore we need them even more. This book intends to help fill that need.

Before you proceed to the examples, we would like you to consider what an architecture is and what the attributes of a beautiful architecture might be. As you will see from the different definitions of architecture in this chapter, ...