In her chapter section titled “Controlling Code,” media and communication scholar Wendy Chun offers a pithy take on the relationship between computer code and legislation.1 “Code,” she cautions against Larry Lessig’s famous motto, “is not law.”2 “Unlike any other law,” she writes, “code almost always does what it says because it needs no human acknowledgment.… Whereas law’s effectiveness depends on enforcement… code’s enforcement stems from itself.”3 Chun was writing about Internet protocols but considering alignments and disjunctions of legislative and informational codes is a gainful pursuit elsewhere. Themed “Coding,” the current issue of TAD tackles the intersection of regulation and information technology in design and architecture. It grapples with analogies, fusions, collusions, and bifurcations between building and computer codes, with an eye on how architects define and operate within frameworks of control.
