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 construc-tion and communication, form and matter, rule and novelty. The paper begins bylooking at how architecture has been discussed in the literature from the words ofboth architects and theoreticians. This leads to identify a set of architecture’s coreelements, in particular regarding the meaning of rules, and a notion of meta-ruleabout composition choices in architecture. It follows that the act of creativity hasa way to manifest itself into this domain via the described interplay between rulesand meta-rules.The main contributions of this paper are an ontology-driven discussion of archi-tecture from the given perspective, and an initial proposal on how to isolate and un-derstand architectural rules. The goal is to show that there is a way to model theseelements and their interactions, that is suitable for future integrations into formalsystems. This, we believe, can turn architectural creativity into a subject for formalrepresentation and exploitation.