A building or edifice is an enclosed structure with a roof and walls, usually standing permanently in one place, such as a house or factory. Buildings come in a variety of sizes, shapes, and functions, and have been adapted throughout history for numerous factors, from building materials available, to weather conditions, land prices, ground conditions, specific uses, prestige, and aesthetic reasons. To better understand the concept, see Nonbuilding structure for contrast.
Skyscrapers under construction in Kalasatama, Helsinki, Finland (2021)
A timber-framed house in Marburg, Germany
Image: Ishtar gate in Pergamon museum in Berlin
Image: Philae temple at night
A structure is an arrangement and organization of interrelated elements in a material object or system, or the object or system so organized. Material structures include man-made objects such as buildings and machines and natural objects such as biological organisms, minerals and chemicals. Abstract structures include data structures in computer science and musical form. Types of structure include a hierarchy, a network featuring many-to-many links, or a lattice featuring connections between components that are neighbors in space.
A traditional Sami food storage structure
Gothic quadripartite cross-ribbed vaults of the Saint-Séverin church in Paris
The spiral arrangement of small bright yellow florets that make up the flower head of a sunflower is an example of the highly ordered structure that characterizes all organisms.
