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Actually, Orchard being an MVC based project, it intrinsically does have models, views and controllers. But it provides much more than that.

The key thing to understand, in my mind, is that at the very core, requests are handled by a given controller, which builds a model, and returns a view that uses this model. What Orchard adds to that is how it builds up a particular model, and how it selects the view to display that model.

Consider requesting a content item by navigating to, say, a content item with alias "/about".

What happens is that the ASP.NET routing will kick in, which has been configured to match against aliases of all content items. The route for "/about" will be found, which is handled by the ItemController of the Contents module (modules in Orchard are conceptually the same as MVC areas). The ItemController will build a dynamic model for the requested content item, which is called a shape. The shape is an instance of the Shape class, which contains metadata about the shape, such as the name of the shape. Based on this information, Orchard leverages the view engine to select the appropriate Razor view to render the shape object.

So you see, all of the basic MVC stuff comes into play. Orchard simply adds a powerful infrastructure on top of it to provide an advanced and flexible rendering system, like turning content items into shapes, which are then turned into HTML via the view engine. But at the end of the day, it's primarily about controllers creating models used by views.