Please note this free event will take place at New Canaan Library.

Kate Orff, FASLA is the founder of SCAPE,  a landscape architecture and urban design practice with offices in New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. Kate will share SCAPE’s ethos and working method and describe some of SCAPE’s signature work including Oyster-tecture and  Living Breakwaters in New York Harbor, Tom Lee Park in Memphis, TN, and the new Manresa Island Park in Norwalk, CT.

As a Professor at Columbia and as a practicing professional, she has advanced concepts of sustainable lansdcapes and urban design at multiple scales. Orff recently contributed the essay “Mending the Landscape” to the publication All We Can Save (One World, 2020). Her book and traveling exhibit with Richard Misrach titled PETROCHEMICAL AMERICA (Aperture Foundation, 2012) draws a cognitive map of climate change causes and effects and anticipates future planning challenges for the American landscape. Featuring photographs by Misrach, the book links the lived experience of communities, degraded extraction landscapes and public health issues in the lower Mississippi to national patterns of resource consumption and global waste. In the New York region, SCAPE’s Living Breakwaters project was awarded $60 million in CDBG-DR funding by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, as part of the Rebuild by Design Initiative. This joint physical-social project in Raritan Bay helps protect Staten Island from future storms, enhances maritime ecosystems and connects residents and students to the shoreline via the Billion Oysters Project curriculum. This project also won the 2014 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, “socially responsible design’s highest award.” It projects a holistic view of human ecology as a path forward and represents a continuum of work that began with the Jamaica Bay study in 2006 and was visualized in ‘Oyster-tecture’ as part of the Rising Currents (2010) exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and–after Hurricanes Irene and Sandy–helped shape the debate on how to adapt and retool urban contexts relative to climate dynamics.