Architect: Engineer + Artist

My job title includes the words “solution architect”, words are interesting things. Words have been used by people to communicate things for thousands of years, and yet we still spend just as much time defining words as we have ever done.

I’ve also noticed that words have a life. They have a meaning for a particular time, that meaning then becomes mainstream, its meaning gets diluted, so people move onto a new word.

So what do these two words in my job title mean?

Let’s start with “architect”. Someone said to me the other day that they regarded an architects is an engineer + an artist. I liked that, it simply summed up a lot of my own feelings.

An architect is someone who has an idea that needs to be brought to fruition, but it can’t just be engineered through technical reasoning, it needs to have some creativity to it, it needs to be beautiful, functional, emotional, efficient, elegant and practical. It also needs to fit the budget and deliver on the requirements.

Art + Engineering

My father is an engineer, my mother is an artist, perhaps that’s how I got here.

I think I’ll leave the “solution” word for another day.