Kate Orff

Architect, Artist, Change Agent, Concerned citizen, Connector, Designer, Engineer, Environmentalist, Idea generator, Parent

Kate Orff is an Assistant 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, design for biodiversity, and community-based change. She is the author, with Richard Misrach, of Petrochemical America (Aperture, 2012) and the co-editor of Gateway: Visions for An Urban National Park (Princeton, 2011.) Kate is also a registered landscape architect the founding principal of SCAPE, a landscape architecture and urban design office. Through her creative leadership of the firm, she explores the cultural and physical complexity of urban landscapes and their unique textures, ecologies, programs and publics. Kate has received design awards and lectures widely in the U.S. and abroad on the topic of urban landscape and sustainability and new paradigms of thinking, collaborating and designing for the anthropocene era. Her work has been cited in publications such as the New Yorker, the Economist, the New York Times, New York Magazine, in addition to architecture and planning publications such as Metropolis, Dwell, Azure, and many others.

urban landscapes, biodiversity, community-building

Community Activism, design for biodiversity, green infrastructure