There's definitely a code component to them, but most of reading about and understanding them would come from reading the surrounding documentation or reasoning

There's definitely a code component to them, but most of reading about and understanding them would come from reading the surrounding documentation or reasoning. Most of that text would be prose, rather than a language consumed by any computer system. I'm not sure what you mean by "understand good architecture." One thing that makes an architecture good is its simplicity and clarity. If it's hard to understand, it can't be that good. I can say for certain: if you understand the problem being solved but not the architecture, then it is for sure a bad architecture.