Genealogies of τέχνη

Abstract

Although Pindar’s craft imagery has long been appreciated, scholars have paid relatively little attention to technê in particular, focusing instead on the apparently more elevated, and more Pindaric, sophia. Concentrating on the odes that narrate the origins of specific technai (Pythian 12, Olympian 7, Olympian 13), this paper questions the dichotomy between technical and ethical knowledge in Pindar. Far from dismissing technê as mere banausic craft, as his critics often do, Pindar consistently presents it as a means of promoting civic and even cosmic order. I conclude with a discussion of Pythian 3, where Pindar makes explicit the metapoetics implicit in the previous poems and figures his own activity as a sort of technê. In this light, Pindaric sophia, as the practice of technê within ethical limits, emerges as a relationship of the individual to the cosmos.

Recasting Concrete: A Case Study in Concrete 3D Printing as an Architectural Pedagogy

“…In DOET, Norman writes that we can use "cultural constraints" to determine affordances; he defines such constraints as "learned artificial restrictions on behavior that reduce the set of likely actions." 10 Architecture clearly has its own set of cultural constraints-architecture students, for example, learn to work, think, and communicate in particular ways that are intended to guide their design processes-yet it has no universally established conventions or constraints when it comes to the digital fabrication technologies that are ever more in its midst. According to Norman, we should, however, be able to use the constraints we do learn to develop individual approaches to such emergent technologies; in other words, we can and should use our individual understandings of architecture to develop distinct, architectural approaches to digital fabrication technologies.…”