The purpose of this paper is to describe the concepts, definitions, and ideas of computer architecture and to suggest that architecture can be viewed as composed of three components: physical organization; control and flow of information; and representation, interpretation and transformation of information. This framework can accommodate diverse architectural concepts such as array processing, mieroprogramming, stack processing and tagged architecture. Architectures of some existing machines are considered and methods of associating architectural concepts with the components are established. Architecture design problems and trade-offs are discussed in terms of the proposed framework.