Structure-oriented computer architecture is a research direction that tries to join the parallel processing facilities and decentralized control of multiprocessors or data-flow architectures with the efficient memory access and pipelining techniques of data structure architectures. The main concepts and the motivation for introducing this term are shown. Data structure architectures are compared with the successful concept of multiprocessors, and some limits of the latter are shown. The term structure-oriented computer architectures is introduced for a class of compound architectures built up from two rival architecture classes. Some effects of these architectures on software quality are discussed. An example of a proposed structure-oriented computer architecture is presented. >