How architectural rules make room for creativity: An ontology-driven analysis

Architecture is said to be a science and an art as it is about construction and communication, form and matter, rule and novelty. The paper begins by looking at how architecture has been discussed in the literature from the words of both architects and theoreticians. This leads to identify a set of architecture's core elements, in particular regarding the meaning of rules, and a notion of meta-rule about composition choices in architecture. It follows that the act of creativity has a way to manifest itself into this domain via the described interplay between rules and meta-rules. The main contributions of this paper are an ontology-driven discussion of architecture from the given perspective, and an initial proposal on how to isolate and understand architectural rules. The goal is to show that there is a way to model these elements and their interactions, that is suitable for future integrations into formal systems. This, we believe, can turn architectural creativity into a subject for formal representation and exploitation.