ABSTRACT
When the verb "codify" appeared in the early nineteenth century it stemmed from the thirteenth-century old French word code, which originally meant a book compiling together some laws. "Codifying" addresses a question long overdue, as to the place and role parametric design and related modeling activities in landscape architecture through advanced computational design. Contrary to conventional wisdom, "coding" does not correspond to some fleeting trend but rather marks a return to a need to inscribe essential meaning in our daily lives on the ground we tread upon. Through new approaches to "coding" it becomes possible to repair this missed opportunity, to create a creative dialogue and to link with a technique that is more in tune with terrain. The punch cards were not made of waxed tree bark but of cardboard, a derivative of wood, and it is interesting to note how this original organic link to etched wood prevailed well into the early coding years of the cybernetic age.
