The art or science of building; particularly used to differentiate between building and the art of designing buildings. In the latter context, there has been great division of opinion as to what exactly constitutes architecture. The most usual standpoint is typified by Ruskin in The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849): 'Architecture is the art which so disposes and adorns the edifices raised by man, for whatsoever uses, that the sight of them may contribute to his mental health, power, and pleasure.'

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Pevsner, in An Outline of European Architecture (1943) puts it more succinctly: 'A bicycle shed is a building; Lincoln Cathedral is a piece of architecture.' Traditionally, therefore, architecture has tended to concentrate on aspects of higher culture, looking at ennobling buildings such as the Parthenon (Athens) and the Pantheon (Rome), and studying the work of great artist-architects such as Christopher Wren and Karl Friedrich Schinkel.

Nevertheless, the practice of architecture in the 19th-c, and especially in the 20th-c, has increasingly involved a larger number and variety of often complex skills and disciplines, ranging from the technical considerations of structural engineering, environmental services, and energy conservation, to the functional considerations of room layout, interior design, and human comfort, as well as the overtly intellectual considerations stressed by Ruskin and Pevsner.

Correspondingly, there has been a greater acceptance of the wider concerns and domain of architecture as anything which has been consciously, or even unconsciously, designed and built for the use of people.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Architecture"