Throughout this text, we have emphasized holism in the role of the architect, which places a great burden on the architect in terms of the number of considerations to be managed. This drive for holism can be misinterpreted as a failure to define a system boundary for the architect’s role. The architect is not the design team, the financial controller, the marketing executive, or the plant manager. To paraphrase Eberhardt Rechtin, the architect is not a generalist, but rather a specialist in simplifying complexity, resolving ambiguity, and focusing creativity.

The architect crafts the vision of the system and communicates that vision among the stakeholders and the extended project team. We will specifically highlight three principal roles of the architect:

• Reduce ambiguity: Define the boundaries, goals, and functions of the system.

• Employ creativity: Create the concept.

• Manage complexity: Choose a decomposition of the system.

In this chapter, we introduce the role of the architect and define the deliverables of the role. We discuss different types of ambiguity and relate them to the role of the architect (Section 9.2). We discuss the product development process as a tool of the architect (Section 9.3). We conclude with a case study on civil architecture, which highlights some universal themes in architecture.