Architecture and the Question of Technology

This topic explores the conditions under which ethics might be applied to architecture. Not only technical thinking itself but also a technical way of making have become the steandards against which any kind of making is measured. Instrumental thinking tends to impose its hegemony by creating a world that it can fully control. The difficulty in breaking that hegemony and in understanding that technology as the fulfilment of the will to power is not uncondition. The will to will ivents here the talk about mission. Mission is the goal assigned from the standpoint of fate. References to mission and fate are a clear manifestion of a deeper historical circumstances, in which the will appears as a historical possibility but always in contrast with other possibilites.

The exisstance of other possibilites and their replacement by simple will, must be taken as a point of departure, of the apparent fatality of technological progress and of the belief that this kind of progress is our historical destiny. The difference between art and technology is from the historical development, in which the two domains originally shared a common ground but became differentiated later into the arts and technology as we know them today. Art originates in techne, which in its Greek sense is a knowledge related to making. In the Greek experience techne was a drama situated between the new possibilites of knowledge and the intimate understanding of the inner possibilites of nature. Poiesis takes place not only in human effort but also in nature. Art originally recieved its legitimacy and meaning from the universal divine order. In the ethical sense they represent individual or group, based on the acquistion of power and on domination. The emancipation of magic and technique from the ethically oriented life of the polis.

The difference between the arts was their involvement with matter and manual labour and with their theoretical status, which was most often expressed only through adjectives —the mechanical arts , usually situated at the bottom of the hierarchy because of the labour in- volved; the liberal arts , which include the trlvlum and the qttadrivlum; and, the theoretical arts, sometimes known as sclentlae, consisting of theology, mathematics, and physics. That the arts represented not only experience and skills but also an important mode of knowledge, is reflected in the ambiguity of their relation to science.
The sciences that contributed to the formation of modern technique and eventually to technology were mainly astronomy, optics, and mechanics, known as the middle sciences. The reason for that desingation was not their "mixed" nature, as is sometimes thought, but their position halfway between metaphysics and physics. In the domain of Renaissance art, mathematics plays a role of approximation, mediation and symbolization.The science invented by human ingenuity is a construct. It is a productive science, motivated by an ambition to be nothing less than creatio ex nihilo, traditionally linked only with divine creativity. The unlimited possi- bilities of invention opened through experimental dialogue have their source in the infinity of will, which for Descartes is a single analogy of the human and the divine. We may conclude that ethics in the architectural context would have to be conceived in general terms and cannot hope to be specific.