SCAPE is a New York City-based landscape architecture firm co-founded by Kate Orff, who is also Assistant Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and co-author of Petrochemical America (Aperture Foundation 2012). The firm has completed projects in Brooklyn, NY, Greenville, SC, and Dublin, Ireland.
Kate Orff is a registered landscape architect and the founding principal of SCAPE, a landscape architecture and urban design office based in Manhattan. After graduating from the University of Virginia with Distinction, Kate earned a Master in Landscape Architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard. In 1996, she was a member of small research group focused on the urbanization of Pearl River Delta, led by architect Rem Koolhaas, which became the first case study in the internationally recognized Harvard Project on the City. Kate later worked for the planning and landscape architecture firm Hargreaves Associates and for OMA/AMO.
Kate is also an Associate Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she teaches graduate design studios and interdisciplinary seminars focused on sustainable development, biodiversity, and community-based change. She is the co-author of Petrochemical America (Aperture Foundation, 2012) and co-editor of Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Park (Princeton, 2011). Her essays have appeared in The Great Leap Forward, Waterfront Visions, Volume, Land Forum, and other books and journals. Kate was named a United States Artist in 2012, a National Academician in 2013, one of “50 for the Future of Design” by H&G, a Dwell Magazine “Design Leader” and was featured in “Front Runners: 25 Young Designers Leading The Pack” by Azure Magazine. She lectures widely in the U.S. and abroad on the topic of urban landscape and new paradigms of thinking, collaborating and designing for the anthropocene era.
Her work has been cited in publications such as the New Yorker, National Geographic, the Economist, the New York Times, and New York Magazine, in addition to architecture and planning publications such as Metropolis, Dwell, Azure, Landscape Architecture Magazine, LA China, and many others. She has been interviewed on National Public Radio, NY1, Bloomberg News, and the Brian Lehrer Show.
