How excellent language skills will make you a superior architect

It enables abstract thought and delivers material value.

Can you think of anything without words? Can you imagine relationships without grammar? Can you relate a story without language?

I've long suspected that my architectural capability grows with my language skills. If it's true, why is it so? When I thought this through, I observed three different facilities of language. They are:

The foremost utility of language is the creation of abstract mental representations of real-world problems and their potential solutions.

Architecture is about constructing models of reality.

These models take the form of images or drawings in our minds or are materialised electronically or physically, on paper or in solid shapes. But each shape has a name. Their relationships in space and time also have names. There wouldn't be useful models without an adequate set of named objects and relationships in space and time.

Language is invented and evolves with the problems and solutions we deal with. If a woman is stranded on a desert island and has to construct something challenging, she'll likely scratch a drawing in the sand and give names to any new objects and dependencies she creates.

So, the richer our language, the more named objects and relationships we have in our minds, and the better we are as modellers.

If the prehistoric people who painted scenes on the cave walls of Lascaux or Altamira could talk to us, we would get what they were trying to record, convey, or affect. The language would allow us to understand their ideas, models and stories that we can only guess today.

Consider then how essential language is to communicate the far more complex IT architecture models now de rigueur.

Architects throw models at each other when they discuss problems and solutions. As we thrash through argument and counter-argument, the models morph until they converge or stop at some state of difference.

But it starts with the ability to convey the problem precisely. The solutions often emerge…

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