Theorizing Technology in Architecture and Urbanism

What does technique mean for us as architects? And what does technique cause us to do in our way of working? Does technique make us sighted – or does it make us blinded? In his script The Question concerning Technology (1953) Martin Heidegger inquires the essence and the appreciation of technology. According to the Greek word techne, in Heidegger‘s perception technology is a kind of production within the realm of „bringing-forth“ (poiesis), affected by an attitude of thinking and revealing the essence of a work. In contrast to this, nowadays it seems that the meaning of the word technique is used conversely: the one thing that counts is the answer or the solution, but not the question or the true problem. Technology has to deliver. In this manner it defines more and more today’s architecture – visibly or invisibly. So what is architecture today in the sense of technology – and what might it be in the former sense of techne? How can we be able to bring forth an architectural „work of art“ – and not only a „tool« or an »equipment“ of habitation, as technology knows to produce? Architecture as a work of art will only be achieved, where anticipation will be answered with un-anticipation – concerning the freedom from an anticipated function, the way of scrutinizing an apparently socially fixed meaning in architecture, or the abandonment of the „solace of a good shape“ (Lyotard). What might get us back to a work of art in architecture is the pursuit of an unexpected answer – by questioning the very content of an actual problem in the former sense of techne. Only this might lead us to follow the secret of an architectonical work of art.