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.
An architecture can help assure that the system satisfies the concerns of its stakeholders, and it can help deal with the complexity of conceiving, planning, building, and maintaining the system.
In our discussion we will use “architecture” as a noun to denote a set of artifacts, including documentation such as blueprints and building specifications that describe the object to be built, wherein the object is viewed as a set of structures.