What is architecture?

One thing about architecture, good and bad, is that what it is exactly, keeps evolving.

I used to think that architecture was a thing- a nice house was architecture, a garden shed was not architecture, but after awhile I got hung up about whether or not really cool looking, nice garden sheds could be architecture.

Then I thought, ok, maybe architecture is actually an attempt to define some kind of quality of space, in the same way "flavor" describes the quality of a taste. This is pretty broad as it you could now easily talk about the architecture of the garden shed, or the architecture of the house. But this is still a pretty poor definition because you could also talk about the architecture of a coffin or the architecture of a hat, as they both create certain experiential qualities of space.

Later, I found a somewhat useful negative statement about architecture- one cannot say "architecture is not" because architecture is ultimately inclusive.

I was most intrigued by a definition of architecture I read while reading about the production of space. The author of the text was arguing that our society puts too much emphasis on the author/creator at the expense of the reader. Huckleberry Finn is not a great book unless it is read and constructed by an astute reader. There's a conversation about text going on between the author and the reader by the means of the document. In the same way, spaces are not created by architects, nor are they created by users experiencing that space- it is a joint collaboration. The architect uses his/her craft to delineate space, to attempt to give qualities to it, but ultimately, it will be 'read' and constructed by the individual user. No two people experience spaces in exactly the same way, so why should the architect be any different? Here, architecture is defined as "spatial text," which I think is a pretty useful definition of architecture as it deals with space framed by "text" which is the framework on which people build their personal conceptions of the world.