We spoke to Kate at SCAPE’s studio in Manhattan about landscape architecture as a form of activism, the relation between ecology and aesthetics, what the profession leaves outside the frame when it concentrates on individual projects, and the political and institutional work required to realise landscape at a larger scale. We also discussed Petrochemical America, the long development of Living Breakwaters, design within America’s highly regulated environment, education, and why responding to ecological breakdown may increasingly require landscape architects not only to make new things, but to remove, undo and dismantle what is already there.
Kate Orff is a landscape architect, founding principal of SCAPE and professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), with a joint appointment at the Columbia Climate School. She directed Columbia’s Urban Design Program from 2015 to 2026. Orff founded SCAPE in New York in 2005, developing a practice that moves between landscape architecture, urban design, ecological infrastructure, research and advocacy.
Her work has been particularly influential in expanding the role of landscape architecture in responding to climate change, biodiversity loss and damaged ecological systems. Projects such as Oyster-tecture and Living Breakwaters in Staten Island have approached coastal protection not simply as engineered defence, but as living infrastructure combining risk reduction, habitat creation and public engagement. Alongside built work, Petrochemical America, developed with photographer Richard Misrach, examined the economic, environmental and political systems through which landscapes are produced.
Orff received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, was included in the TIME100 list of the world’s most influential people in 2023, and received the Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture in 2024. SCAPE received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award for Landscape Architecture in 2019 and the ASLA Firm Award in 2025.
Zaš Brezar (b. 1984, Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia/Slovenia) is founder and editor-in-chief of Landezine. Educated as a landscape architect (University of Ljubljana), he spent several years in practice, later establishing Landezine in 2009. He is focused on the production of space, specifically mapping, tracing and interpreting the course of landscape architecture and questioning its role in society and politics of public space. For his work with Landezine, he received Plečnik Medal in Slovenia in 2025.
Kate Orff, RLA, FASLA, is a landscape architect, founder of SCAPE and Professor at Columbia University, where she directed GSAPP’s Urban Design Program from 2015 to 2026. Her practice integrates landscape architecture, ecology, infrastructure, research and advocacy, with a particular focus on climate adaptation and ecological restoration. She is the author of Toward an Urban Ecology, and co-author, with Richard Misrach, of Petrochemical America. In 2017, Orff became the first landscape architect to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. She received the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in Landscape Architecture in 2019 and was named to the TIME100 in 2023.
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This is beautiful and massively inspiring. Thank you Kate Orff