Kate Orff


Kate Orff, RLA, FASLA, is the founding principal of SCAPE, a design-driven landscape architecture and urban design studio based in New York. She also is the director the Urban Design Program at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and co-director of the Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes. Orff is the first landscape architect to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.
Orff's work focuses on retooling the practice of landscape architecture relative to uncertainty of climate change and fostering social life which she has explored through publications, activism, research, and projects. She is known for leading complex, creative, and collaborative work processes that advance broad environmental and social prerogatives.
She has designed projects across the United States and internationally. She lectures widely in the U.S. and abroad on the topic of urban landscape and new paradigms of thinking, collaborating and designing for the Anthropocene Era. Orff is also listed on TED talks, the Architectural League NY, Aperture Foundation, and WNYC. Orff also teaches interdisciplinary seminars and design studios at Columbia University.
She was listed first by Elle Magazine in 2011 as one of nine women involved as "fixers" for mankind.
She is the director of the Urban Design Program at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she is founder and co-director of the Urban Landscape Lab. According to the Urban Landscape Lab biographical information her office, SCAPE, has won local and national design awards. She was named a Dwell Magazine ‘Design Leader’ and H&G's 50 For the Future of Design.

Early life and education

Orff grew up in a once-gated suburban community in Crofton, Maryland, to which she has been designed for the use of cars and created on the steadfast idea that oil was what kept modern settlements relevant. During Orff's summers of high school, she worked an odd string of jobs; for one summer, she as a fishmonger and another she worked at a plant nursery. It was at the plant nursery that she learned about plants and began to enjoy the activity of gardening.
Orff attended the University of Virginia in the undergraduate program of Political and Social Thought which was founded by Richard Rorty. The program offered Orff freedom in choosing the path that she wanted to take within her studies. This led to her looking at women's studies, environmental sciences, sculpture, forest ecology which intertwined the arts and science in the University of Virginia curriculum. It was during this time in her early studies that Orff wrote her thesis on Ecofeminism in which she found connections between environmental degradation, poverty, women's issues. In addition, Orff learned about architecture school and enrolled in Reuben Rainey's class who is a well-known teacher of landscape architecture history at the school. During his class, Orff realized that landscape architecture was a combination of many things that she was passionate about; it integrated her interests in science and politics as well as her talent in art and design. While at the University of Virginia, Orff played varsity lacrosse and also coached a high-school girls’ team. She then graduated with Distinction from the Bachelor of Political and Social Thought. Before returning to school in a Master in Landscape Architecture program from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, Orff Off traveled to Chile and worked on a women's health magazine.

Design philosophy

Orff's passion for the role that landscape architecture takes in cities has led her to the belief that landscape architects must do more than "beautify"; instead, they must assist in resetting the ecosystems to reconnect people to each other through social spaces that also implement ecological services. She states that, since the formation of the discipline, landscape architects had been working closely with the carbon-centric world; people have been creating wonderful gardens as a focus for the field but has been letting the Earth decay in the back-drop.
To redirect the attention to the planet's ecological systems as well as link them to policy ideas and infrastructure, Orff constructs a framework of engagement for her designs to create a resilient landscape that can handle future threats of the environment in the future sea-level rise and increase wave action. Orff's studio, SCAPE, which she established in 2007, is well known for its ecologically driven projects throughout the world and takes on many projects that emphasize sustainability due to her feelings of responsibility for the environment. In her studio, Orff and her team produce a design that is based on science and research as well as an activist approach.

Career

In 2004, Orff moved to New York and started her practice out of her studio apartment near Union Square. She started taking on employees in 2007 and thus formally established her firm, SCAPE.
Orff and her firm, SCAPE, have developed a design called "Oyster-lecture," which serves as ecological infrastructure to filter polluted water and mitigate the effects of storm surge and sea-level rise through the construction of oyster reefs. Following Hurricane Sandy in 2012, Orff and SCAPE were selected to join an interdisciplinary team for Mayor Bloomberg's Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency. SCAPE's role in the harbor-wide study was to integrate natural systems as risk-reduction infrastructure, and layering strategies for enhanced coastal protection and ecosystem health. The project was awarded an ASLA-NY honor award in 2014.
In 2014, SCAPE was recognized as the winner of the Rebuild By Design competition in order to preserve communities after Hurricane Sandy in 2012. SCAPE's winning project was a play off of Oyster-tecture called "Living Breakwaters" and was meant to reduce erosion on the shoreline of Brooklyn, New York. Living Breakwaters serves as an environmentally-friendly, natural oyster reef that should be able to "clean up to millions of liters of harbor water each day." Living Breakwaters has won not only the Rebuild by Design competition, but also the Buckminster Fuller Challenge in 2014, the ACEC NY Engineering Excellence Award in 2015, and the National Achievement Award also in 2015. According to the SCAPE website, the project was due for construction in 2019.
Orff was one of presenters at the Landscape Architecture Foundation's The New Landscape Declaration: A Summit on Landscape Architecture and the Future held in Philadelphia on June 10–11, 2016. This summit brought together the leading minds in the field of landscape architecture to create a declaration on how we need to move forward in a challenging future. The subsequent book that followed this summit published an essay by Orff entitled, “Urban Ecology as Activism”.
In 2017, Orff was the recipient of a "Genius Grant" from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Orff received the grant for her designs in "...adaptive and resilient habitats..." and for reviving ecological systems.
In 2018, Orff was a keynote speaker at United States Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse's ninth annual Rhode Island Energy, Environment and Oceans Leaders Day, held at the Rhode Island Convention Center. The event was attended by approximately 200 attendees from federal and state agencies, municipalities, environmental groups, and the energy industry.
In 2019, Orff was elevated to the American Society of Landscape Architects Council of Fellows – one of the highest honors bestowed on landscape architects practicing in the U.S.
Also in 2019, Orff was honored as Waterfront Alliance’s Heros of the Harbor.

Credentials

As a landscape architect, Orff is accredited in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, South Carolina, Minnesota, and Arkansas. She is also CLARB Certified.

Major works

In 2011, Princeton University published Gateway, Visions for an Urban National Park by Kate Orff. In 2012, the Aperture Foundation published Petrochemical America, a book by Orff which won the National ALSA award in the communications category in 2013. Petrochemical America featured Richard Misrach's photography of the industrialized Mississippi River and visual narratives by Orff and SCAPE.
In 2014, Orff was recognized for her work designing the 103rd Street Community Garden, a winning site of Built by Women New York City, a competition launched by the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation during the fall of 2014 to identify outstanding and diverse sites and spaces designed, engineered and built by women.
Orff's Toward an Urban Ecology, which is part monograph, part manual, part manifesto, reconsiders urban landscape design as a form of activism, demonstrating how to move beyond familiar and increasingly outmoded ways of thinking about environmental, urban, and social issues as separate domains; and advocating for the synthesis of practice to create a truly urban ecology. The book has been lauded for its forward-thinking design provocations that catalyze the reader with a way of thinking and acting ecologically across systems. The book was awarded a National ASLA Honor Award in 2017.

Recognition and awards

Accomplishments

Academic

In 2005, Orff was recognized as a Design Fellow in the New York City Audubon Society.
2008, National ASLA award for Bird-Safe Building Guidelines, created in collaboration with the NYC Audubon Society and Columbia University.
2010, Named one of “TED Women: Reshaping the Future”
2010, National ASLA Award: Communications Category, Safari 7
2010, MoMA Rising Currents Team Leader
2012, USA Artist Fellow
2012, Architectural League of New York “Emerging Voice”
2012, ASLA-NY Award, Collaborative Design Category, 103rd Street Community Garden
2012, ASLA-NY Award / Planning, Analysis: Confluence: Portal to the Point, Research & Communications Category
2013, National Academician
2013, National ASLA Award: Communications Category, Petrochemical America
2013, AIA Institute Honor Award for Architecture: Cornell University Milstein Hall, w/ OMA and KHA Architects
2014, Buckminster Fuller Challenge Winner / “Living Breakwaters”
2014, HUD Rebuild by Design Winner / “Living Breakwaters”
2014, Named One of Fast Company's “Most Creative People”
2014, Buckminster Fuller Challenge Winner: Living Breakwaters
2014, ASLA-NY Award: Collaborative Design Category, Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency Coastal Protection Plan
2014, ASLA-NY Award: Unbuilt Category, Deconstructed Salt Marsh
2015, ASLA-NY President's Award for Leadership
2015, National Planning Achievement Award for Environmental Planning / “Living Breakwaters”
2015, American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture
2015, ASLA-NY Award / “Glen Oaks Branch Library”
2015, ASLA-NY Award / “Cove Co-Habitat”
2015, NJ ASLA Award / Site Design, “DMAVA Park and Hudson River Walkway” w/ Langan Engineering
2015, NY AIA Honor Award: Urban Design Category, “Beijing Horticultural Expo 2019 Landscape Masterplan”
2016, National SARA Award: “The Hudson Riverport”
2016, NYC Public Design Commission – Award for Excellence in Design: “Snug Harbor Music Hall Landscape”
2016, NY SARA Award / “The Hudson Riverport”
2016, ASLA-NY Award / “Blake Hobbs Play-za”
2016, American Planning Association – Kentucky Chapter, Special Merit Award for Outstanding Use of Technology: Civic Engagement / “Town Branch Water Walk”
2017, National ASLA Honor Award: Toward An Urban Ecology
2017, National SARA – Visionary Architecture Award: “Vagelos Education Center”
2017, NYC Public Design Commission – Award for Excellence in Design: “Greenpoint Library and Environmental Center”
2017, AIA New York Design Award – Best in Competition: “Vagelos Education Center”
2017: AIA New York Design Award – Honor in Architecture: “Vagelos Education Center”
2018, ASLA-NY Merit Awards: New York-Presbyterian & Columbia University Medical Campus Joint Master Plan
2018, ASLA-NY Honor Awards: Hall of Science Discovery Terrace and Gowanus Lowlands
2018, ASLA-NY – Honor Award / “Gowanus Lowlands”
2019, National ASLA, Elevated to Fellow
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Publications