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.
Kate Orff on landscape architecture as activism, the limits of “buffering,” Petrochemical America, Living Breakwaters, and why the profession must look beyond individual projects to the larger ecological systems already in collapse.
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