First landscape architect gets ‘genius grant’
New York landscape architect Kate Orff, 45, grew up in Crofton, Maryland, a place she remembers as the type of suburban community built around the automobile and molded on the tenacious idea that the lifeblood of modern settlement is oil.
“We have, intentionally or not, built the American landscape as a massive consumption machine for petrochemicals,” she said.
She thinks of oceans of lawns, fed by fertilizers and herbicides, of the creep of highway-reliant suburbia and exurbia, and large detached houses that gobble up energy and exhale greenhouse gases.
Orff is representative of a shift in her profession that is shaped primarily by the client’s needs and desires to one that confronts pressing environmental issues, particularly in urban and coastal design.
Orff’s firm, SCAPE, has an impressive portfolio of ecologically driven projects, and its work is getting noticed, including as the lead designer of a $60 million barrier reef and shoreline restoration project in Staten Island called Living Breakwaters.
Recently, Orff became the first landscape architect to receive a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. (The announcement came as Orff, who also teaches at Columbia University, was in Amman, Jordan, with students looking at water systems). The prestigious prize grants its fellows, 24 this year, a stipend of $625,000 and is sometimes called the MacArthur “genius grant.”
If landscape architects cleave into two types, the place maker driven by aesthetics and the environmentalist urban designer, Orff falls squarely into the second camp.
Since her student days — Orff studied at the University of Virginia and Harvard University — the professional focus on ecologically driven design has
become mainstream and has always been central to her work.
Living Breakwaters is just one of several projects her firm is working on in the New York region responding to the destruction of Hurricane Sandy in 2012. In another major project, in Lexington, Kentucky, the studio is helping to create a 2.5-mile linear urban park by uncovering a stream now channeled by an underground culvert in what was a classic engineering approach to urban waterways.
On Staten Island’s south shore, Living Breakwaters rejects traditional levy and dune building in favor of a series of offshore breakwaters designed to reduce the effects of storm surges. The project incorporates oyster reefs, wetlands and strands — features that once defined the cultural and economic identity of New York’s coastal communities. A major part of the project is in creating buildings and programs to connect Staten Islanders to the revived environment. Work is due to begin next year.
Historically, urban planning and development has been the province of engineers who, in the past at least, have approached their work as “single-dimension problem solving,” she said. “We are trying to look more holistically.”
Her inspirational figures have included the iconoclastic Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and the San Francisco-based landscape architect George Hargreaves, whose firm is known globally for large and environmentally complex urban revitalizations.
Orff acknowledges the influence of the father of ecological landscape architecture, Ian McHarg, but says female pioneers deserve better recognition.