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.