BY BRADFORD MCKEE

Kate Orff, ASLA. Image courtesy of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

FROM THE NOVEMBER 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

Kate Orff, ASLA, became the first landscape architect to receive a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, which carries a $625,000 award over five years for “originality, insight, and potential.” Orff was among 24 fellows named by the foundation today, who also included artists, activists, scientists, and historians.

Orff is the founder of SCAPE Landscape Architecture in New York, and the director of the urban design program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. The firm’s work has achieved wide renown in recent years for its novel and intensely collaborative approaches to addressing climate change, urbanization, and species survival.

The Living Breakwaters proposal for Staten Island’s northern shoreline. Image from Toward an Urban Ecology, Kate Orff and SCAPE Landscape Architecture.

The firm’s best-known project, Living Breakwaters, is scheduled to begin construction next year off the north shore of Staten Island, having won funding from the Rebuild by Design competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The competition, begun after Superstorm Sandy in 2012 to find defenses for the New York and New Jersey region against rising sea levels, realizes a proposal Orff first brought forth for the Museum of Modern Art’s Rising Currents exhibition in 2010. It will place constructed oyster reefs offshore to filter polluted water, calm wave action at the shoreline, and help restore a once-thriving oyster population in New York’s harbor. SCAPE is also leading one of 10 finalist teams for a new effort, Resilient by Design, around San Francisco Bay.

In Lexington, Kentucky, SCAPE is designing the Town Branch Commons, a large-scale daylighting of an urban stream that opens new public spaces through the city and celebrates the region’s porous limestone geology. Orff’s 2012 book with the photographer Richard Misrach, Petrochemical America, deeply parses the legacy of industrial pollution along the refinery corridor of the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and New Orleans (see “What Kate Orff Sees,” LAM, May 2012).

As significant as the ideas embedded in SCAPE’s designs, which exploit the natural energies of environmental systems, is the firm’s community-driven approach, which emphasizes painstaking enrollment of the public and decision makers in building awareness of design and its social and environmental impact. “Kate has reconceived the ‘public’ in public space to include nonhuman as well as human life,” said Elizabeth K. Meyer, FASLA. “In doing so, she has formed new links between urban design, landscape ecology, and landscape architecture.”

A listening station invites the public to learn about the story behind the design of SCAPE’s Town Branch Commons project in Lexington, Kentucky. Image courtesy of SCAPE Landscape Architecture DPC.

Orff noted upon announcement of the MacArthur award that her work is driven by “a belief in organic systems and social life, and hard, persistent work over years with a lot of pitfalls and occasional successes.” She said SCAPE considers it crucial to “break out of the ‘internal’ design narrative to engage regulators, politicians, and a wider swath of decision makers.”

The MacArthur Foundation cited in particular Orff’s coalition-building in design practice, noting that “her collaborations and community outreach strategies extend the boundaries of traditional landscape architecture.”