Working definition. Architecture is intention made environmental: a structure that continues to organise behaviour after its designer has left the room.
Inherited meaning
Its oldest domain is the built world, where walls, thresholds, paths, light, and proportion quietly choreograph life. The term later moved into software and organisations because the same principle holds: underlying structures make some actions natural, others difficult, and some almost unthinkable.
Meaning in the imagination economy
After AI, the decisive creative object is often not a single artifact but the possibility-space from which many artifacts emerge. A prompt, model, interface, incentive, dataset, ritual, and permission system can together form an architecture of imagination. Good architecture expands meaningful agency; bad architecture produces abundance while narrowing the futures people can actually choose.
What changes in practice
Do not ask only whether an output is attractive. Ask what repeated behaviour the surrounding system invites, what it hides, who can alter it, and which futures it makes easier to inhabit.