ПРОДУКТИВНАЯ ПОВЕРХНОСТЬ

THE PRODUCTIVE SURFACE

From the legacy of high modernism, an emphasis on form, technique, function and technology has dominated the representation of surface in architecture and landscape architecture. Form privileges the expressive, a response to the question of what the surface could be; while function privileges the operational, a response to the question of what the surface should be. Certainly, these hard-lined distinctions have not always been so clear, though they have organized camps of thought in 20th-century design histories and practices. Yet external to this pairing is an overlooked history of what could be called the “productive surface.” The productive surface is a constructed terrain with the ability to - simply put - yield something. In other words, it has a tangible, positive byproduct - for example, energy, or biotic or abiotic components. The productive surface depends upon an intimate understanding of context, climate and natural processes. It may operate at the scale of a building or region, or at scales between - because of its networked and scalable logic. The goal of the article here is to reveal a 20th-century history of the productive surface, establish its key progenitors, and interpret and assess its recent resurgence.