During the 2017 ASLA annual conference in Los Angeles, we spoke with Kate Orff, who is the founder of New York based SCAPE Studio. Through this conversation, we got some insight on her latest publication, learned about her design philosophy, and listened to her thoughts and driving ideas about creative work she aspires to facilitate through her awarded MacArthur Fellowship. Orff is also an associate professor at Columbia University at the Graduate School of Architecture and recently released the publication “Toward an Urban Ecology”. We discuss topics such as design-driven advocacy and the multi-range scales that it can impact in the field of landscape architecture, as well as the importance of science-based design, a concept that is explored in her latest publication.

Produced by: Joanna Karaman

Purchase ‘Toward an Urban Ecology’

Kate Orff Interview Transcribed by Tim Switzer

Joanna Karaman: So going back to the beginning, could you briefly describe what brought you to the practice of landscape architecture?

Kate Orff: It’s funny, my sister is an urban planner, my father is an engineer, and my formation or at least discovery of landscape architecture happened while I was an undergraduate student at University of Virginia. At UVA, I was in a cool major’s program called “political and social thought,” and that was founded by the philosopher Richard Rorty, the late Richard Rorty. But in that program, I had a lot of, frankly, freedom to define my own path of study. And so while I was there, I was kind of looking at women’s studies, took a lot of environmental sciences, sculpture, forest ecology, and sort of found this pathway that wove together the arts and the sciences in the UVA curriculum. I wrote this thesis called Ecofeminism, which I would love to pull out of the garbage bin at some point.

Also while I was there, I discovered the architecture school and took, for example, Reuben Rainey’s class – he’s a famous professor there who teaches history of landscape architecture. I actually wrote to him recently that probably about three quarters of the way through the semester, when he started to show more contemporary forms – I remember Bixby Park, he was writing an article about Bixby Park at that time – all the sort of bells went off in terms of feeling that landscape architecture was this intersection of many things that I was passionate about, and that sort of brought together the sciences and politics that I had been studying together with my actual talents, which were more along the artistic and design-based realm of talent. So that’s my story. That’s how I kind of figured that out and then basically realized that I was going to apply for landscape architecture graduate schools around that time – after taking a significant sideways trip to Chile, and working on a women’s health magazine, doing all of these crazy things. But I eventually found myself back in a master’s program for landscape.

JK: That’s funny that you mention your undergraduate thesis, because I’ve been following your firm’s work for quite some time, but I wasn’t aware that you had written this Ecofeminism document, and how women were leading environmental movements because of their traditional roles of caring for children, or gathering the firewood, or just being more connected to the larger ecosystem.

KO: Yeah the physical landscape…

JK: I think that’s really fascinating, and I was wondering – well if you could bring that out of the trash and share it – if you see any of these themes from your undergraduate thesis resurfacing now or throughout the years of your practice in landscape architecture?

KO: I mean it’s interesting because at those early studies, I was really trying to connect the dots between environmental degradation, poverty, women’s issues, and I feel like literally – yes, in my mind, SCAPE is a landscape architecture firm; we do have projects on the boards like parks and playgrounds and all these sorts of things that are typical project typologies – but how I think is still very much rooted in that way of literally design as pattern and connection and understanding how things are interrelated and interconnected.

The Petrochemical America book of 2012 in particular was kind of a broad-front study on – not a proposal for Baton Rouge, but rather a large-scale comprehensive research project that was looking at the interconnectedness of multiple phenomena in the American landscape that bridge from the extraction of oil and gas and its refinement, to connect this to public health issues and waste issues, and literally, displacement of African American communities and increasing threats to health and wellbeing. This sort of mindset or philosophy, which is holistic and based on trying to understand patterning and connections, drives my thought process today.

JK: It’s interesting, the work in your Petrochemical America book uncovers all these layers in those landscapes by the Mississippi River, but also makes connections to our larger consumption patterns in America as a whole.

KO: Yeah, I think that was a big part of it, because that area was known as “cancer alley.” When Richard Misrach, the amazing photographer that I collaborated with, went to that region, “cancer alley” was the framing by environmental justice advocates. But then when we reassessed and began to look more deeply in the years since – and not only 10 years or so – the whole scale had shifted from being a local or regional crisis to really something that reflected much more broadly on logistics and consumption, and supply and demand across these broader roots in America.

So even between the 1996 study and the 2012 study, my focus shifted really from the river road to Airline Highway and these other big box corridors and highways that really were these places of the consumption of these petrochemical products that were being extracted. So it was truly this shift in scale at that point, and as much as I look to that work, I feel like there’s so much more work to be done.

We’re here at the ASLA Conference in Los Angeles now, and I’ve spoken with Elizabeth Meyer from University of Virginia, an amazing scholar, and she and some others were discussing in some sessions here this framing of racialized topography. I kept thinking back to this Petrochemical America book – […] the displacement chapter and how much work still needs to be done about literally how that chapter looked in a very fine-grained, granular way at very specific community and people, and how the shift of home-ownership, displacement, fragmentation, and lack of social cohesion happened within, frankly, a very short time in that region. And how almost every city within the United States, whether it’s New York City and the Bronx Expressway, or Poughkeepsie, New York, or Charlottesville itself and Anchor Hill – to use Beth’s words: the racialized topography is something that we’re only now getting a full 360 view of – and how important that is for landscape architects to not just focus on making beautiful houses for rich people and photographing them for awards, but also to take on some of these very very difficult issues that have their incredibly deep tentacles and roots in land use and land policy.

JK: Stepping back a little bit, I was wondering if you could briefly describe what it’s like to set up your own firm and practice. Especially being a woman in landscape architecture, were there any hurdles in this process that you went through that others could potentially learn from?

KO: I would love to be helpful for every woman starting out in the field in as much as I possibly can. You know, my own path was circuitous, and do I feel like if I ever woke up one morning and said ‘I’m going to start a 31 person office,’ it would be so overwhelming as to make me shy away from that. But I think the reality is, I came out of master’s training and worked in a couple of offices and then just really decided that I can do this, and I had a lot things I wanted to say to be totally honest. There were definitely tough times, I mean I started SCAPE by myself in my studio apartment in New York City. I had a lot of ramen noodles at that time. I had a dial-up Dell computer. I guess for me personally, I have a very high tolerance for risk and just realized, frankly, that I need very little to survive [laughter]. So there was a lot of that kind of thinking and also feeling like a conventional sort of life wasn’t necessarily my own path.

That being said, I worked for some period of time and I think frankly, of the most difficult things for women in positions of leadership is the issue of having a family. So if you have a partner or not, or if you’re interested in raising children, which is typically frankly “women’s work” – and it does fall back into “women’s work” despite tremendous progress in all sorts of [legislation like the] family leave act, etc. – it’s just very difficult, because the second you get out of school and you’re actually 10 years into it and you feel like “hm I actually know something,” then it’s literally when you’re in the midst of these child-rearing years. So I kind of got around that by having children fairly late and meeting my husband fairly late, being able to kind of power through, and having a team of people – a really strong network of people- around me both personally and professionally to help be a mesh, which could catch and carry everybody forward. I’m not sure how that translates directly into advice, but certainly of know your limits, and know your personal threshold for risk and tolerance for having a life that is not a conventional one.

JK: You’ve recently released a book Toward and Urban Ecology, and this serves as both a monograph and manifesto for your firm’s practice. The book covers projects such as your well-known Living Breakwaters project, the Town Branch Commons project in Kentucky, and you kind of organize everything through these four lenses – Revive, Cohabit, Engage, and Scale. The book is also sprinkled with guest contributing essays and interviews, and I was wondering if you could talk about the process of curating your work in this way.

KO: Sure, it’s funny because I’ve done a couple of books – one which was Gateway, on the idea of ecological infrastructure in Jamaica Bay, the Petrochemical America book – and had always frankly just avoided doing a book about SCAPE simply because I see the office as not-book [laughter]. I see all the work in Columbia and other kinds of research as book-making material. But I guess it became pretty apparent that it was important to try to gather and show the process and show the content of the work.

With Toward and Urban Ecology, I really felt from the outset that what I did not want to do is show projects in the abstract, because I feel like so many monographs, whether they’re gardens or other landscape architecture firms, show almost like abstracted photographs, whether they’re black and white or framed in a certain way, and for me, that’s truly not what excites me about landscape. That’s not my aspiration for our projects, and I really wanted to develop a book that had this strong siv of ideas – our projects are very ideas driven, so I felt like it should be organized relative to an ideas framework.

Also, the work that we do – there’s so much that goes into the way that we work in the landscape that isn’t just about this abstracted moment from a singular person looking through the eye of a camera. So much it is about working, is about engaging with people, is about leading tours on the shore of Staten Island, or marching down Vine Street in Lexington, Kentucky with blue chalk or whatever it is, [and these] are means and methods to get people to connect in a more direct way with their immediate environs. That was my goal for the book – let’s rip off this cloak of abstraction and the frankly aesthetic lens we use to judge landscapes if you will, because in my take, this concept of a very activated productive landscape is something that is much more interesting, much more dynamic and textured, and involves people. So the book really takes that tack and tries to highlight that aspect of the work, [because] that final moment where the professional photographer clicks the button is to me the least interesting moment to be totally honest. That was the bigger framing idea of the book, and the projects themselves are interspersed with – you know what I’m trying to cultivate is really a creative network of like minded people – so the projects themselves are much more actively overlaid with interviews with individuals in our creative network, and also with writers who partake in what I would call the ‘messy’ practice of landscape architecture. Something that is more vibrant and fun, and isn’t as neat and tidy as some of the photography might lend you to think it is.

JK: Yeah I like how it directly reflects your practice and kind of positions itself as a tool kit and as a resource in itself and not just documenting after the fact.

KO: That was the goal. That was the goal and you know, I feel like my own work is at this intersection of ecology and activism so that the book itself is really trying to push those ideas forward and show literally how that is manifest.

JK: I was wondering if you could expand or talk a little a bit more about this design-driven advocacy and how it differs from other forms of advocacy.

KO: I really think of design as being this hyper-creative, problem-integrative process where you’re using many tools in the designer’s toolkit, whether it’s visualization or convening a conversation, or showing potential alternative scenarios. I guess design really has this strong role that it’s not really just about policy. I gave this talk just on Saturday at one of these ASLA sessions about, literally, the framing of the project itself and highlighting the tension or the friction between the project that is the ‘right’ project to do relative to increased benefits for social life or marine organism diversity, [which] are projects that are currently not permittable. Exposing that, defining that, not just necessarily designing a project that’s within the current boundaries of what is possible, but designing the project you feel is the right approach. Then having the intensity and the knowledge base to then translate that to a policy-making audience and say ‘here’s why this is currently not possible. Here are things that in a very specific way could be changed to set this forward in the future.’

So that’s another way I think design could play a role [in] testing this benefit of – you know my essay was called Dark Matter as a reference to some of the work of Helsinki Design Lab – of this kind of invisible decision-making processes, and administration regimes that literally in many ways define what landscape architects do. So I think those are two different ways that design can play a role as advocate from the project scale, up to pulling together tools to lead community interactions and interventions.

JK: You also make the point that design should be science-based. I was wondering if you could talk about a specific example of how you’ve partnered with ecologists or science professionals in your practice. What does it really take to make that first phone call or make that first step towards collaboration?

KO: Well that’s a great question, and I think so much so as we’re all now grappling with increased uncertainty of climate change. But one note in the New York context post [Superstorm] Sandy is that we had the IPPC, the New York Panel on climate change, that basically took the consolidation of the scientific consensus regarding sea-level rise and a range of other phenomena, but as relative to the New York region, and made very clear and specific guidelines as to how design needs to adapt in what our design criteria are. Inasmuch as these kinds of scientific consensus documents can provide design criteria, that’s a great starting point which is building this better bridge of understanding, even if there’s this uncertainty built into that process.

At the same time, for the Breakwaters project, we were able to build on a lot of the research on water chemistry, on species suitability that was done by the ORRP (Oyster Restoration Research Project) in NY/NJ Baykeeper in the New York region. Building on a lot of the science that has been done on oysters and water quality by them and the DEC to develop a very specific set of design criteria, to develop very very detailed modelling protocols to understand how this infrastructure sits within the landscape, and what its effects will be, from sediment models to wave models, etc. Also, we developed an incredibly robust marine benthic survey with marine ecologists to go above and beyond what the typical benthic survey might be to understand in an incredibly detailed way. That way when we monitor the project later, we have this robust set of data against which to monitor. So those are just a couple of ways that that project has really innovated relative to science and engineering processes.

JK: Can you speak a little bit about the logistics of your method of practice and being more proactive – not just for an RFP or competition to pop up? How do you find these projects? Is there a certain amount of client education that needs to talk place? And how do budget-wise or financially…

KO: Ah yes, the hardest question ever… At the beginning, a lot of the work was really driven by ‘what am I interested in?’. It’s almost that simple: what are the questions you want to ask and for me, some of the big questions were – at least when I was in school, literally the entire area of water was not necessarily conceived of as a space of intervention or design. So [with] a lot of the work with the Jamaica Bay research and oyster-tecture and living breakwaters, landscape architects aren’t just making lawn panels like beautiful LA’s on land, but rather we need this whole new set of tools and techniques to develop much more biodiverse, interconnected, and socially adaptive waterfronts and watery landscapes. That was an entire thread within the office that was pushed forward.

At the same time I felt that – this probably stems from Rachel Carson and all my eco-feminist early work – that some of these larger issues in the landscape literally around the land policy and around chemicals (and how chemicals move through the landscape and are stored in the landscape) are also this giant – I don’t even want to call it [an] elephant in the room, because that would be an understatement frankly. We’re all focussing on, to be sure, making beautiful spaces and so on, but I just feel like the entire planet is sort of disintegrating around us, so let’s try to focus on those aspects and pull forward Rachel Carson’s agenda and understand what it means now, so that was really the Petrochemical thread. Those are two big research questions that I’ve tried to I’ve tried to promulgate.

How does it work? I mean it works differently in different ways: I got a grant from the National Parks Conservation Association back in 2005 to look at Jamaica Bay for example, and the National Parks in the outer harbor. I got a small grant from US Fish and Wildlife Service to study and to do the bird-safe building guidelines. So these tiny tiny little grants are almost like an encouragement if you will; they don’t cover by any stretch the actual amount of work done, but they help. In another way, the Rebuild by Design and Resilient by Design that we’re doing now in San Francisco, being led by Gena Wirth in the office, is for us another exciting way to have an open-ended question, an open-ended agenda. We’re studying this concept of public sediment for Resilient by Design, and these kind of frameworks can push the firm internally to study something different and in a new way.

JK: Yeah, it seems like mostly it’s driven by this curiosity… But I will follow the hardest question with the easiest question – what do you like to do outside of practice? How do you unwind? Is there such a thing a work-life balance, and how do you find that with everything you are involved in?

KO: That’s a great question! I mean, I think what I try to say is just don’t use the word balance, because balance is some kind of stable state that is not part of my vocabulary, whether that’s intellectual or personal. It is this kind of push and pull between many forces. I have a really strong family life, I have a husband and two kids, and I will say I started out thinking that everything would be all mixed together, and I would bring the kids into the office and all this, but the reality is I guess that’s a sort of psychological coping at a certain moment. But I really tried to make some strong separations, so when I’m home, I’m 100% home and just “Mom,” and I try to be almost like a different person in these two worlds in order to preserve the preserve the dynamics and the preciousness of being a mom and a full part of my family. I do have a lot of help in that regard in terms of babysitting and parents and inlaws and so on that make that all happen, but otherwise the short simple answer is: I love to play tennis, and I like to go on walks. That’s pretty much what I do to unwind.

JK: To wrap things up, as has been recently mentioned in the press, you’ve been the first landscape architect who has been awarded the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship. I would just like to say congratulations and thank you for continuing to elevate this profession and practice in this way. Although nominees are reviewed for their achievements, it’s not necessarily a lifetime achievement award. It’s more of an investment in person’s originality, insight, and potential. So in this vein we were curious if you had any ideas about what creative work you’re planning on facilitating with this, or if you’ve thought about goals and aspirations with this grant.

KO: I see it as a kind of launch into the future, and I was kind of hoping to fold some of the grant back into this research of the office, in particular around the idea of ecological infrastructure that we’ve been advancing for so many years at this point, and in resilience. For so much of what needs to be done, there’s simply not a client, or scope, or project to help structure that work. So that was basically my idea – to formalize a little bit, to help support the public sediment work, to help push forward our work in Jamaica Bay or South Bay, and really focus more on America’s endangered bays and wetlands as these kind of sites of the future.

JK: OK great, I’m looking forward to seeing what comes from it, and thank you again for your time.

KO: Thank you so much! That was great, thanks.