Kate Orff has built a life where design, community, and environment entwine with conviction. As the founding principal and partner at SCAPE, a studio she launched from her New York apartment in the early 2000s, she turned landscape architecture into a tool for change, steadily reshaping cities, coastlines, and public imagination.
Roots of Inquiry and Action
Raised in suburban Maryland, Kate found early inspiration through odd jobs, from caring for plants in a nursery to selling fish, that introduced her to the raw elements of life and the fragile ties between nature and culture. Her undergraduate studies at the University of Virginia embraced political thought, environmental science, sculpture, and forest ecology. It was there, writing a thesis on eco-feminism, that she first saw how social justice and ecological health belonged together. A master’s in landscape architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design then propelled her toward building real-world solutions.
SCAPE: Design as Ecology and Belief
Kate founded SCAPE around 2007 with a firm belief: landscape architecture must be more than decoration, it must activate the life systems of the places it shapes. SCAPE became a studio rooted in research, ecology, and community, bringing together ecology, social life, policy, and design into unified, living landscapes.
Perhaps her best-known idea, “oyster-tecture,” envisioned oyster reefs as living seawalls, cleaning water, softening waves, and restoring ecosystems. The Living Breakwaters project on Staten Island emerged from this thinking, transforming post-Sandy resilience into habitat regeneration and community engagement.
At the Intersection of Teaching and Practice
Kate’s voice isn’t confined to the drawing board. She shapes minds as Director of Columbia University’s Urban Design Program, co-director of its Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes, and professor at GSAPP. There, she molds future leaders who find power in collaboration across disciplines and geographies.
She urges students to see design as activism. In her words, “landscape architecture is not just a discipline, it is a stance, a stance of activism”.
Honors from Genius to Influence
Recognition followed Kate’s fearless ideas. In 2017, she made history as the first landscape architect to receive a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, honoring her work in adaptive, resilient design and public stewardship of ecological systems.
The awards continued to pour in: Scape earned the 2019 National Design Award, she joined the ASLA Council of Fellows, and earned the title “Hero of the Harbor” from the Waterfront Alliance.
In 2023, TIME magazine named Kate one of the world’s 100 most influential people, alongside icons across fields. Jeanne Gang praised her as someone “never hemmed in by garden walls, seeking instead to liberate landscape to repair our warming planet”.
Additional honors include the 2024 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture and an honorary doctorate from Delft University of Technology in 2024.
Publications & Projects That Speak
Her books are as thoughtful as her designs. Petrochemical America (2012), with photographer Richard Misrach, examines the sensitive terrain of environmental impact and human legacy. Toward an Urban Ecology (2016) reads part manifesto, part design manual, inviting others to act and imagine. She also contributed to All We Can Save (2020), amplifying women’s voices in climate leadership.
From urban parks to coastlines, her firm also designs installations, exhibitions, and self-guided urban walks that invite people to see their cities as layered with hidden systems waiting to be understood and rebuilt.
A Personal Lens on Design
Kate brings a simple yet profound energy to everything she does. Whether shaping oyster reefs or guiding student dialogue, she stays rooted in curiosity, rooted in people. Her work never feels remote; it’s grounded in the sand, the tide, the conversation among strangers turned collaborators. It’s design that breathes.
