Kate Orff

Recorded on April 17, 2026. Read a transcript at the bottom of the page.

Founded in 2005 in New York by Kate Orff, SCAPE is a landscape architecture and urbanism firm of 90 landscape architects and urban planners with additional offices in New Orleans and San Francisco. The firm’s work ranges from large-scale coastal infrastructure initiatives, river systems, and city parks to publications, exhibitions, and self-guided podcast tours.

Orff was recognized as an Emerging Voice by the League in 2012 and received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2017, the first in the field of landscape architecture. A 2013 National Academy of Design inductee and an ASLA fellow since 2019, she received the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture in 2015. SCAPE received the 2023 Obel Award and the 2019 National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum.

Orff is a professor at Columbia GSAPP with a joint appointment at the Columbia Climate School.

About I Would Prefer Not To

Conceived and produced by MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab and presented with The Architectural League, I Would Prefer Not To¹Herman Melville, “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall-street,” The Piazza Tales (1856). tackles a usually unexamined subject: the refusal of an architectural commission. Why do architects make the decision to forfeit the possibility of work? At what point is a commission not worth it? When in one’s career is it necessary to make such a decision? Whether concealed out of politeness or deliberately shielded from public scrutiny, architects’ refusals usually go unrecorded by history, making them difficult to analyze or learn from. In this series of recorded interviews, I Would Prefer Not To aims to shed light on the complex matrix of agents, stakeholders, and circumstances implicated in every piece of architecture. The podcast won the 2025 AIA Architecture in Media Award, a prize recognizing contributions that elevate and challenge architectural discourse.

Transcript

This transcript was created using speech-to-text AI software and was lightly edited for continuity. The text may not accurately capture all information or aspects of the conversation.

Ana Miljački 00:21
Hello, and thank you for tuning in. I am Ana Miljacki, professor of architecture at MIT and director of the Critical Broadcasting Lab. And on behalf of the Architectural League of New York and the Critical Broadcasting Lab, I welcome you to our architecture podcast series titled I Would Prefer Not To. I Would Prefer Not To is an oral history project conducted through audio interviews on the topic of perhaps the most important kind of refusal in architects’ toolboxes: refusal of the architectural commission. By definition, the topic of refusal stays hidden from public scrutiny and thus also hidden from history. Withdrawals of this kind tend not to leave paper trails and are not easy to examine or learn from, and yet, the lessons contained in architects’ deliberations about and decisions not to engage are politically relevant and urgent. Decisions to not engage a commission, or types of commissions, or commissions with certain characteristics inevitably forfeit potential profit, placing other values above it, at least momentarily. Today, I’m talking to the founding principal of Scape, Kate Orff. Thank you for joining me, Kate.

Kate Orff 01:30
Hi, thanks.

Miljački 01:32
Kate Orff founded her landscape and urbanism firm Scape in 2005 in New York City. Two decades later, Scape self-identifies as a collaborative landscape architecture and urban design practice of 90 landscape architects and urban planners and fierce ecological advocates headquartered in New York, with offices in New Orleans and San Francisco. Kate is the founding partner among five partners that now steer the ship, including Gena Wirth, John Donnelly, Alexis Landes, and Pippa Brashear. Orff’s and Scape’s work ranges from large-scale coastal infrastructure initiatives, river systems, city parks, to rooftops, as well as book-length publications, museum exhibitions, and self-guided podcast tours that invite city dwellers to explore the natural histories of their regions. All of it is guided, as they say, by a radical belief that nature can heal itself if we help it. As soon as Scape launched, the firm’s work pushed the boundaries of the discipline of landscape architecture, which garnered Kate and her firm a number of important accolades already in the first decade of the firm, including the Emerging Voices from the League in 2012 and the MacArthur Genius Fellowship for Kate in 2017, the first one to go to a landscape architect. She was also inducted in the National Academy of Design in 2013, as well as the American Academy of Arts and Letters in Architecture in 2015. Kate Orff was made a fellow of ASLA in 2019, was named Urbanist of the Year in 2020 by Architects Newspaper. The firm also received the 2023 Obel Award and the 2019 National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Kate Orff was a Time 100 honoree in 2025. Every project we examined has its own list of awards, with Living Breakwater with at least five important ones, and there are very, very many projects in Scape’s portfolio. I mention only some of the most recent ones: the Massachusetts Resilient Coasts Plan, the Louisiana 2023 Coastal Master Plan, also winner of the 24 ASLA Professional Award, Pratt East Hall Plaza, Living Breakwaters finished construction in 2024, Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts Plaza and Park, China Basin Park in San Francisco, Tom Lee Park in Memphis, Disney Headquarters New York, and many of them forthcoming in the U.S. and elsewhere, including Chattahoochee Brick Company Memorial Park in Atlanta and the Enterprise Research Campus Plaza in Allston. Kate Orff is also professor at Columbia GSAPP with a joint appointment at the Columbia Climate School. She is the director of the GSAPP’s Urban Design Program. She is the author of several books that I hope we invoke by name in what follows. And her work has been exhibited at MoMA as well as at multiple Venice Biennials of Architecture. There is so much important work here that my lines of what I’m including and what I’m not feel really arbitrary, but so I hope we can get to some of the details of it all as we talk today. But as you know, Kate, we have been starting these conversations with the most memorable decision not to engage or to drop a commission, and if that has not happened yet, then try to imagine it happening, and on what grounds?

Orff 05:03
So, thank you, thank you for that and that generous introduction. I feel exhausted now, just getting going. But you know, I was thinking about this phrase, I would prefer not to, and I really did, I mean, I think there are… I think about Scape as, like, this living organism. That it just started with one person, me, in my studio apartment with a drawing board under the bed and a Dell computer where you put the phone in the receiver, and it made that sort of like ringing dial-up song. You know, I would do like one Photoshop image and then wait for a couple of minutes for it to transfer over the Dell dial-up. And so, you know, at that time in the very early days, it was pretty inconceivable that one even would understand that there would be a day that you might turn down a commission, because I was a sole proprietor and remarkably you know looking back, paying my own health care, just writing a check to Blue Cross Blue Shield for a quote-unquote individual plan for $675 a month or something, so, in the very early days I think just the idea of getting anybody to pay you to do what you love to do seemed like, well that will never happen, and so I, kind of, in my starting Scape I was working at OMA or Office for Metropolitan Architecture as a 1099 and I worked for Dirt Studio as well, and did the Turtle Creek Pump House. But then I started to say, “Well, I’m getting my own projects.” And the first project that I did get is a typology of project that I no longer accept, actually. So that was a roof garden for the supermodel Christy Turlington. I’ve actually never said this before, but I did Christy Turlington’s roof garden, and that was before she met Ed Burns. And anyway, there are so many things. So I was like starting out, and then all of a sudden, you’re just measuring elevators and having all these kind of personal conversations, and so that is what probably launched Scape as its first project, and to this day, I shy away from residential projects, not because of that experience, because she’s absolutely a wonderful person, but mostly because of the sort of intense personal nature of residential landscape, and I’m, you know, very conceptual and very very driven. I know what I want to do. So ,any sort of residential landscape now, I’we have taken some in the past, and then I kind of either regret taking them or tried to kind of taper them out or pass them on to somebody else.

Miljački 08:11
That’s a great beginning. I love hearing about the start because we will try to travel the distance today in this conversation. So one of the headlines of the lecture that you have been touring has been, or at least the one that I captured, has been a question that says, “How do you work at the scale of the challenge? And then you have also described what Scape and you both do as retooling the practice of landscape architecture relative to the uncertainty of climate change and creating spaces to foster social life, and between these two, I’m sort of wondering how these motivations impact the way that you think about what you say yes to. Do you seek out situations, or do they present themselves to you?

Orff 09:01
We actively seek them out. In the case of this statement of working at the scale of the challenge, I mean, it’s if you are a lover of landscapes and you see the patterns and interconnectedness of natural systems, and you also understand where things are breaking down and breaking apart. There is always going to be a kind of an inherent frustration with the projects that quote-unquote knock on the door, and the projects that I would say just need conceiving and doing. And you know, often those projects cross states or many landowners or agencies, and there’s not a clear client for them. And you can think about a watershed as an example, or you know, the Mississippi River, which has so many jurisdictions along its length, or et cetera, et cetera. And so, this concept of working at the scale of the challenges is not also something that comes to you. So, the CPRA, for example, I actively sought that collaboration out with the state of Louisiana, and we developed this project called Our Future Coast together with scientist Dr. Don Bosch, and basically that project, Our Future Coast, was essentially a kind of, I’m not sure what the term is in theater, it was like a dress rehearsal, if you will, for working at the scale of the entire coast and understanding in a much more applied way how the science is working, and so that project, which was very much about hearts and minds and about visualizing what kind of a future is possible, was made really with a small grant from the Walton Family Foundation. And then, but that sort of set us up to be able to conceive of how something that is done outside of the kind of traditional client relationship could be sort of parlayed into work on the coastal master plan for the state of Louisiana. So, we approached the CPRA, myself and Chris Barnes, who was a studio director in New Orleans at the time. We showed our work. We showed our work that we had done for the New York Harbor after Superstorm Sandy. The planning work at this, at the entire harbor scale, et cetera, and we showed our visualization work, and so we were able to be brought onto that team through, like, an on call and through various mechanisms. But that was definitely something that I felt like, well, this CPRA plan, the coastal master plan is where I hate to use this analogy, but the rubber is hitting the road. It is literally how money is being allocated and spent on coastal projects. So ,it felt like if you weren’t involved in that in some way, that it was a little bit, you know, too much of like, Photoshop fantasy. So yeah, it was a direct chase, if you will.

Miljački 11:43
So ,I love that we now have the the first rooftop project and something that sounds like a dress rehearsal because I’m actually wondering how has this changed over time? Maybe the how do you get to, what do you have to step through to get to working at the scale of the challenge? Right?

Orff 12:46
Yeah. So, I guess the dress rehearsal is probably an apt metaphor, and I would say that I am focused on what I want to do, almost to the level of like, psychosis. Like in some ways, so, you know, I have a kind of a line that I’m following, and it’s not that I don’t take wild detours and passes. I mean, it’s more of like…I’m from the Chesapeake Bay area in Maryland, so I do a lot of canoeing. So if you’re canoeing, you’re definitely just canoeing and canoeing, you paddle, paddle, paddle, and you know, okay, well, I’m going to go on the eastern side of this island, and then so, but by the time you’re looking around, you’re looking at the birds, you’re kind of thinking, oh, I need to put my hat on. But then are keeping paddling, and so you know your direction, but it’s just like, constant toil, I guess, in the interim. So I guess I feel like that’s kind of my MO, which is understanding what I want to do and where I want to go, and then just letting all that work unfold in the interim. And so yeah, the other way I’ve tried to do that is by just… and what’s funny is it sounds when I look backwards and I say oh, first I did this and then we did this and then this, it sounds like transactional like A B C. But it was not that at the time. It’s like, I was interested in birds and birding and it was to develop the bird safe building design guidelines, and that led to meeting the Audubon side people, and that led to being a big part of the sort of New York City nature crowd, which, et cetera, et cetera. So, none of that was like, I don’t know, intentional or you know, something that I had an idea of like, I’m going to do this and then that. It was just more about following what you’re interested in and then trying to understand at each moment how to capture that into a project. And I think that’s the other thing that I’ve tried — I’ve managed to do — I have a lot of interests, but the idea of sort of capturing that into an initiative or a project or an exhibition or something has been something that that I’ve tried to try to do.

Miljački 15:07
Well, I’m going to ask you more things in that direction in a way because in your recent lecture at Harvard, you made a big point of describing the relationship between publications and the research that has gone on for them, and the catalytic repercussions of that work on your work, and I think I hear that a little bit in how you’re describing this kind of path, but I could see feedback loops between those two, and I think it’s worth talking about maybe that process of scaling, which is a little bit different than the word that you were, the way you were using the word in the work to describe the work itself. But it occurs to me that there is some kind of scaling that also happens between research and intervention and back again. I’m partly interested in it to capture, maybe, or talk about the pace at which you take moments to pause and put your eyes on the reality, as you called it in the lecture, and then redirect, or at least keep going in the direction you’re going, but now with more sort of certainty about what you’re after.

Orff 16:28
Yeah. So ,I have been taking some time to reflect. Now I can’t say that I’ve had, because being at Columbia and teaching and you know, kind of helping direct the Scape practice, there has not been a lot of time for reflection, but I have been doing more of that recently with a little bit more time on my hands. And when I look back to when I moved to New York and I was in Toronto with OMA, and then I came to New York, and then I was like looking around, like, well, what is interesting to me here? And that’s really when I got focused on Jamaica Bay, and just as this landscape that it seemed like it was everybody’s dump, and this was back in 2003, 2004 and it was like the wetland that was a dump, the wetland that has marsh islands that are disappearing, and people know why. But there’s so many different reasons why about, like, excess nitrogen, sea level rise, boat wakes. You could just go down a list, and about 10 things, none of which could be isolated into one thing, and then basically began to draw, first of all, interview people, and then track what was happening in this landscape. And in a very, in a funny way, looking back, that for me, literally became a kind of a mental template of how I was going to organize my practice moving forward, and so that mental template was scalar, to your point, in the sense that the Jamaica Bay project was a drawing project and a mapping project and a writing project. So, I had this kind of general thesis about okay, well, Jamaica Bay is currently like where everyone dumps the garbage and et cetera. But what if it’s actually the most important form of ecological infrastructure that the city has, and what if we valued it differently? And then also what would it mean to engage Jamaica Bay? So that brought me into literally how Scape is practicing now, which is understanding the policy, city, federal, state, local overlaps, the role of community because the Jamaica Bay Eco Watchers and the American Electoral Society and others at that time were fomenting different ways of intervening and changing, and it kind of forced me to articulate this notion of ecology as infrastructure in a way that I had not done before, and at multiple scales, like at the harbor scale, and then at the scale of the mussel and the oyster. So that overlay of policy of watershed, of water quality, of critters, and the sort of participatory aspect of what could be literally created a scaffolding in which I was moving forward within the world, and that could not have happened in terms of… I mean, if I had not done that project, I do not think that I would have that scale of ambition that I had after that project. So, if I was, if I had done, like, three more roof gardens, for example, I would have been like, oh, maybe I should just get a fifth roof garden. But after doing that, it’s sort of like, okay, here’s what needs doing, and here’s something that I understand and can sort of contribute in a way that that is kind of new.

Miljački 20:24
I love the description of that collection of media and even epistemologies that are involved in the thing that you’re describing, having to describe. And I’m wondering if that means that among the 90 people in the office, there are different capacities or expertise that track with these different sort of dimensions of the work.

Orff 20:50
Yes, and I do not want 89 Kates. That is the opposite of what a successful office would look like. So really, I was reflecting… Sorry, I’m going to go on a little tangent here, but one of the publications I showed was the Great Leap Forward, and that was the publication with Rem at Harvard. We were the, kind of, first batch of mode B written thesis, and we went, six of us were involved in that project, and Rem had this kind of funny way of being both very generous but also kind of typecasting people. And so he would be like, “You’re ideology, you’re money,” you know. And so the chapters of the book were basically the sort of facets of the urbanization, kind of writ large, of the Pearl River Delta that we then began to explore and unpack, and so having someone point at me and being like, “You’re landscape,” you know, was sort of like, Okay, I’m landscape, and so it is my job to understand landscape in all of its complexity, whatever that means, right? So I had to sort of invent that. So that’s a long way of saying, I think I find myself also operating in this way in the sense that, we have a managing principal Alexis Landes and, honestly, within a couple of months of her being there, I was like, You’re going to be the managing principal, so get ready. You know, or Gena, like, You’re going to be the design principal. And it was sort of like I, the actual way that I’ve organized the office, I think, is unique in the sense that it’s not like myself and then 10 principals, each of whom are expected to be complete practitioners within their own selves. It’s that I’m trying to organize the office as this kind of coordinating set of experts. I don’t know expertise is the right word, but you know, kind of things that we’re all focusing on exactly, strengths, personality strengths, and so it’s that sort of dynamic that has then shaped a team that then is stronger than any one person and kind of resists the siloing of many projects with just like leader A, leader B, leader C, and so. I do feel like even within that set of leaders, there’s someone who’s much more focused on, like, technical planning and resilience planning, and that actually migrates to every level in the firm where, you know, we have two guys in the office who are like the stone guys, and they love stone. They know the quarries. So that once you get to 90 people, the expertise then gets sharer and weirder, I guess. But in general, we do have individuals who really are very good at systems and planning policy. We’re doing a project right now for the city of New York about shoreline management and using a planning framework to develop shoreline management strategies. So that’s two people who are very into policy, and one GIS wizard, right? So that’s like a certain type of person. Then we have other people who are just, can draw, you know, draw like an angel and develop a 3d sketch of something in two minutes. And so it’s really, it’s really rich and varied in terms of the types of people that are in the office, and I think that we benefit from that.

Miljački 24:30
Well, thank you for that. I will get back to the office because I have a whole suite of more office based, or studio, how do you call? Do you think of it as an office, a firm?

Orff 24:39
I use the word office, or practice

Miljački 24:39
Practice, OK.

Orff 24:39
but I don’t like to, you know, glam it up like that. We are, like organizing ourselves, in such a way to be able to really be our practice.

Miljački 25:12
So, I’m curious about your collaborations with architects or how those figure in your work, apart from actually scaling the work in a particular way. It seems that you have been cultivating also certain relationships. Certainly, the one with with Jeannie Gang seems important with commissions like Arkansas, Brooklyn Fire Station, Harvard. But also, she wrote a little profile for you in Time.

Orff 25:42
I just did one for Walter Hood too!

Miljački 25:44
So I’m interested in where, what is the zone or kind of place that occupies in the broader body of work?

Orff 25:55
Yeah, I mean, for starters, I feel like I’m not a landscape architect who’s like, “I hate architects.They’re the enemy.” It’s really more about trying to find people that you respect and admire and want to work with, and then honestly, who you have, you’re able to have a little bit more of a mind-meld with, because what I don’t want to do is just, you know, have someone at Scape be sent like a zip drive of backgrounds, right? And then upon which we place things, right? That’s not really how I like to work and so obviously Jeanne is someone who I adore and respect, and we kind of approach problems in a similar way. Sometimes I think like she’s my, like, big sister from another, you know, like an architectural big sister because we have a similar way of seeing patterns and approaching things and working, a model and then sketching, and just sending things back and forth very fluidly, so, and I really like, I mean with Jeannie too, she’s so interested in nature and natural systems…

Miljački 27:10
She told us a lot about birds when we talked.

Orff 27:12
…And, but of course, but then she’s an architect and so she’s really focused on buildings and the built expression of that. So it also helps when, um, I think the collaborations that do not work well are architects who make untoward claims to being, like, we do architecture, we do landscape we do, you know. It’s sort of like the list and then there’s just like multiple things after that list, and there’s not necessarily that interdisciplinary respect or complementarity that happens. I do like to approach sites very synthetically, in which both architecture and landscape are participating in a conversation with the world and with the site. I guess I’ll leave it there. But there’s always really good ones, and then there’s sometimes ones that actually do precipitate an I Would Prefer Not To situation, and those have happened as well.

Miljački 28:19
So, your website currently lists many typologies of work. Some are architectural and geographic scales, like interiors, parks, plazas. I’m quoting from your website. Others are larger thematic ideas, like resilience, ecological design, etc. And of course, they overlap when you start digging through those headings, I guess. And all of these (probably simultaneously) happen in the office. But I’m interested in how you’re thinking about commissions and also operations in the office map onto the typologies that you listed for us, in a way, to understand the work.

Orff 29:12
What I feel like our website does for better or for worse right now is it flattens this incredibly diverse array, and sometimes I like to show that we think it all scales, right? And then it’s just like taking a snapshot of any moment on our website, and you’re just like, what am I looking at? I’m looking at coastal Louisiana. I’m looking at a tiny plaza, but we’re going to undertake a, kind of a slight restructuring of the office to really pull the urban design, planning and what I would call technical planning or technical resilience planning into a bucket, and then make sort of smaller pockets of, like, landscape architecture, more landscape architecture focused groups. So, so those will, you know, the work will then manifest within that structure based on geography and in outcome. Is the outcome CD set and construction administration, or is the outcome a plan? Or a sort of policy recommendation, etc? So we are beginning to parse that out a little bit, but in general, what I found is that many, a lot of our staff actually enjoys going back and forth, and I think people come to work at Scape because of, it may be like I’m always talking. I’m always talking about, like, the complexity you got to get just right up to the moment right before your brain just like melts into a pile on the table, so we’re always like right up on the edge. It’s like in the morning, I’ll be looking at the, like this coastal zone management kind of GIS maps, and then the afternoon I’m like, I think the brick should be on its side, you know? So there is a little bit of that brain melt happening, but obviously we’ve, we sort of cluster people based on what their interests are.

Miljački 31:46
My next note was that we should talk about the oysters, but also the various curricula that you’ve been developing in conjunction with both oysters and mud. And I was kind of fascinated by that dimension of your talk, recent talk.

Orff 32:06
Yeah, yeah. It’s hard for me to not talk about oysters. I’m just very excited because this is another kind of moment of, like, sitting with the Borco drawing board and not feeling like… like right now, because we had the ribbon cutting for Living Breakwaters, and the oyster seeding is happening, etc. It feels like oh, it was always a fait accompli. It was always going to happen, but there were like 50 very very dicey moments. Let me be very clear, between, at every turn, right? Whether or not we would even get the project, and I had to be very aggressive with the state to say, like, we are the most qualified. We are you know, and like literally with bleeding fingers, kind of scratching our way into the room to be able to deliver that project. So looking backwards, it’s like, oh yes, that was this long thread that just kind of kept going, but it was through grit and many trials and tribulations. So, I’m, it’s exciting now because what’s so great about landscapes too is that they’re never finished, there’s an initial point, but I always feel like the project always starts when it starts. It’s not, like, oh in five years when the drawings are done it’ll start. So that’s why I get very interested in curriculum, and it’s how I got very interested in the idea of community engagement as a kind of form of prefiguring the eventual stewardship of the landscape, right? That is about to be. So that’s something that we really pushed in Living Breakwaters, which we’re doing sanding on the coast and doing water hub design charrettes in middle schools, so it’s sort of like the project is what it is even before it takes a physical form. It’s still, it’s all part of the project and so the curriculum for me became the actual, the OG, the original gangster of curriculum was Safari Seven, which was with Jeanette Kim and and Glenn Cummings from, I don’t even know what year that was, 2004, 2005 maybe, and so we developed this Safari Seven, I was like, listen while you ride on the number seven train, and unlock urban nature in your own backyard. And so that was an engagement process because students, you know, helped interview and create podcasts. Then we did an exhibition. We did all sorts of related things. But one of the things was a curriculum. And so when we brought the, we kind of took the model and everything on a roadshow, and it was at Grand Central Station, and we had students ride, listen podcasts, and then their teachers had a curriculum, and I learned a lot about just the basic mechanics of how to approach curriculum because again, it’s not like okay, this is what I want, but with, curriculum are state certified, right? So you basically have to know where you’re slotting in to a curriculum. Are you in the eighth grade biological sciences ecology module? Okay, so that’s a two-week module, and then you’re actually sort of using the structure of these modules to be able to kind of insert something like this. And of course, it has to be incredibly easy for teachers. It has to be freely downloadable, modifiable. Everything has to be right there because our poor teachers are so, so overtaxed as it is.

So that curriculum started with Safari Seven, then Living Breakwaters and Billion, with Billion Oyster Project did a curriculum, and which has these three downloadable modules, and then we sort of just kept going because, particularly Tom Lee Park, we developed who has, who I think is the, if you want to give the golden star to any client, it would be Carol Coletta of Memphis Riverfront Parks Partnership. She was our client for Tom Lee Park, and I showed her Living Breakwaters, and she was like, “Kate, let’s do it.” And because, what’s exciting about the curriculum for me is that it means that you know, way way back in Gateway, interviewing National Parks people, there was a National Park ranger that said to me, because I said, Oh, tell me about da da da the users of the park, and she said, “I don’t really like that phrase because if you’re a user, then the park is the used, and that’s not what we’re trying to do.” And that got burned into my brain. So it’s always like, how do you not do that? So, for Tom Lee, the curricula became a way of sort of getting people to the, it’s a 30 acre park in a way that, it’s not like an end user and used relationship. It’s, and so now all Memphis third and ninth public grade, public school students have this, are in this curriculum, and visit the park, and so it’s, they’re like trying to identify oak leaves. They’re thinking about health, urban health, and microclimates of the shade that the hundreds of oak trees provide, and so on. And they’re thinking about the Mississippi River, a larger corridor where they live. I feel like it’s just, if I’m not gonna like, maybe you could help me articulate this, but you know, before modern landscape, right? There was this kind of sense of agriculture and people working in the land…

Miljački 32:06
Stewardship.

Orff 32:06
…and, yeah, and having a very direct relationship to it. But obviously, we’ve lost that. We’re all, like, doom scrolling and, you know, whatever. And so it’s like, okay, so even though we’re not going backwards but what are other ways that people are sort of tied in a positive way to a place? I feel like a curriculum at least opens the door to that idea so it’s something that’s exciting.

Miljački 38:38
I love it. So I have a constellation of questions regarding the organization of the practice that I try to pose to everyone, and in the case of a 90 people practice, I’m particularly interested in how you’re organized, and you’ve started telling us about that. So maybe I, just give you the question that I try to ask everyone, so we can compare these notes. But do you have any procedures in place by which you both expose your team to the realities of running the office, and do you invite them to think collectively about the commissions that you will and will not take?

Orff 39:18
Yes, yes, and I will say that, you know, if I’m thinking about the decadal aspect of Scape, the first decade was, or even like pre, it was just like, getting the ideas moving and understanding the mission, and then that first decade was just building up, like doing the libraries, doing the, and then building up and understanding about what a practice is, etc. And there was like, Toward Urban Ecology book, and then after that thing, it was like, okay, now I need to now design the office to be able to deliver and implement these projects, and particularly Living Breakwaters was like, This is our project, we are doing it. But it required a certain amount of thinking infrastructurally about the office and not just saying like, Oh, help me, help deal with this, you know. So when you ask, it’s like, I never call it a studio because a studio for me seems like, Oh, I’m just covered in trace paper and like running around, telling people what to do, which is really not what I was aiming for at that time. I was really aiming to try to set up a team and structures for feedback and for organizing people that were going to work. And so we have — I mean, I suppose we’re probably not the only firm that has it — but we do have an annual retreat, and we’re all in person one year, and then the second year, the opposite year we’re virtual. But we spend a big part of our budget on getting everybody physically in a room, and I sort of launch it with like a, “Here’s what we’ve done, and here’s where we’re going, and here’s the sort of the vision,” and then we go through literally, pretty systematically showing projects that we’ve done. We go through our financial outlook and prospects to say like, this was a good year. We had this many wins. So in a way that you know is digestible for people, and then we have breakout rooms and teams, and then we all kind of like workshop problems in the office or challenges in the office. So that is probably the main way. So that’s annual, and then we have a Monday morning meeting, which is a weekly gathering in which our BD team also says, these are things we’re pursuing or not pursuing, and if people have ideas, da da da, do you know, should we bring on an architect who might have ideas? So, that’s, that Monday morning meeting is also a chance. But it was funny, for the procedures for go and no go, which is, it’s, before we, I logged on I was thinking about, like, what were some of the no goes, but the no goes for me are pretty instinctive at this point. We do have, our business development team writes a whole summary and looks at, pulls out all the requirements and then, but usually it’s like a, Oh no. I actually pulled up on my email the NEOM ask we were asked to, I mean, I imagine many people were, I have no idea but, and I just wrote back, This is a no. And so there wasn’t like a lot of back and forth. It was just sort of, there’s some, there’s like a, usually a pass and a hard pass kind of posture, and for those have to do with just reasons of, you know, for reasons about areas of the world that I would like to steer clear of. Now they also have to do with like, Oh, we wouldn’t be able to staff that project. It’s kind of, more of like the gritty reality of staffing. We’re trying to hire four people right now. I do not have the ability to take on it. You know?

Miljački 43:01
You’re gonna hit a hundred soon.

Orff 43:32
Oh gosh! But those, so though there are protocols, but sometimes those protocols can be, if you will, short circuited by a forward email: This is a no.

Miljački 43:38
An instinct.

Orff 43:48
Yeah.

Miljački 43:52
But maybe also generally, you have been super clear when it comes to distilling ideas and values that drive the work, and that’s, I think even as on behalf of Scape, it feels like that’s clear on the, in your, all of your messaging. But so I’m also wondering how does that map onto the larger practice that Scape is now? Like, how do you talk about those types of topics, values, ideas, direction?

Orff 44:03
Yeah. So that’s, I would say in small ways it percolates through our design conversations, Monday morning meetings, the projects that we’re taking, and then in the big statements, it’s usually at that annual retreat, but I think it’s just clearer and clearer what we’ve managed to do well, also. And what is a differentiator of our office, and realizing that that’s something to really lean in on. It’s not something to correct. I definitely feel like it’s, yeah, it’s just something that sort of is pushing through, and then what’s funny, I have really done a lot of talks, but I’ve done a couple of talks recently, and then I realize how much I’m kind of sharing the message of Scape, and then most of the time I’m like, okay, now I need to do that more in an interior way because I also imagine the office just chugging along and being right there. But of course, that kind of stance of communication and constant communication doesn’t go away, right? Like there may be 10 new people in the last year that basically haven’t experienced that, even though in my brain I’m repeating myself. So yeah, so I mean, I think that is not something that I don’t know if I’ve kind of nailed that, but it does, to your point, kind of require almost like a constant evergreen stance towards.

Miljački 45:56
I have a few more simpler questions. So, did you ever regret taking or not taking a commission?

Orff 46:04
The commissions that I regret taking were along the lines of, I would cluster them under wishful thinking, where, you know, there’s a residence and there’s a big coastal part of that residence, and I’m like, maybe I could get, you know maybe we could do some coastal oyster restoration and da da da da and, you know, trying to graft your own aspirations onto a project that may or may not be able to carry those aspirations and those are the ones that I regret because then, I mean, admittedly I have a strong conceptual focus and maybe less of a, you know, chumming it up personal way of dealing with people so that, those usually don’t end well. I really feel like I’ve learned what a project can carry or hold, and not trying to project what you would like it to carry or hold, because that is a recipe for a disaster.

Miljački 47:16
For some reason, your answer reminded me of something I meant to ask you earlier, which is to talk about the aesthetic dimension of the work, like when does the question of aesthetics enter your conversations internally or externally, and how does it?

Orff 47:37
Yes, it’s very interesting you ask that because, at one point when we’re doing IIT, Mark Schendel and Jeanne and Jeffrey Johnson and I were having a beer in Chicago, and then I’m like, what is a Jeanne Gang building? And she’s like, what is a Kate Orff landscape? And I’m like, I hope that I don’t discover that, but, ideally, what I’m after is not a, a tapered bench, like, Ooh, it’s a tapered bench, that’s Scape! you know? Or, you know, a bagel, or, there’s something which is kind of an aesthetic harbinger of authorship, because what I, and I’ve had this conversation about Living Breakwaters and what is beauty for me, and for me there is incredible amount of beauty in the idea of life and bringing back life and like aesthetically, I get very excited about connections that have been severed or that are being brought back together, and so what’s funny about, like, I think living breakwaters are, they’re interesting in their shape because they’re actually designed in a very specific way to kind of answer kind of a question about performance and function and that habitat right? So it’s all these things, like the wave break aspect, the shape of the, the width of the reef streets have to do with finfish sizes, and the sizes of the boulders have to do with the wave action, you know, etc. So there’s a lot of mental beauty that I think goes into the intellectual, actually. But the actual, you know, the actual beauty is the oysters that you can’t even see that are underneath the water or the seal that’s hauled out, where it’s this like, this bald eagle circling. Like, that for me is just beautiful and exciting, and I also think there’s sort of a lot of beauty in, and again, this isn’t like the shape of a landscape but, in connecting in landscape, if you understand natural systems and processes, you know that there is like one specialist bee, and the proboscis is a certain length because it is matched to the native mallow, you know? And so, that is beautiful, right? And then I have artistically a vine in my backyard, which is the pipe swallow vine, that only the one type of butterfly can pollinate this vine, and that butterfly is in extreme decline. So little things like that get me personally very animated and excited. And so I’m always, but I think it’s difficult, right? Because every project has a form…

Miljački 50:45
And an image.

Orff 50:47
Yeah, and an image. And I think one of the more formal projects, if I can use that word not ironically, is China Basin Park, because China Basin, you know, there’s this Mission Rock kind of grid that was built of buildings on a grid, and then it sort of pulls out, and then it meets the the water China Basin with the Giants baseball park across the way, the Giants, you know, Giants baseball park, and basically, with that form, I started to just try to pull these forces together and like loop out. But it’s almost like a diagram of an urban gesture of reaching out to the context around it. And then, so I actually got excited about that also formally. And actually, what it does spatially is quite interesting because we lift it up, the center of that park, so that when you’re just entering it, you don’t have this big expansive view of the bay. It’s kind of hidden from you until you reach further into the park, and then once you enter the park and you’re up on this big sort of meadow, looking down. Then everything behind you disappears. So it’s a form, but it’s also kind of organizing your experience in space and elevationally. And so I’m excited about that as a form too because I see how it works and it also feels like, it feels compositionally like one big park, but it also when you’re there you feel like you’re maybe in a small, one of five, five parks, but have very different experience.

Miljački 52:37
I’m glad I asked you this question. So, so a couple more. Are all commissions equally exciting, or are there ideal commissions, or ideal circumstances for a commission, or ideal scales for you? I’m just-you don’t have to answer all of these, but the one that is most interesting.

Orff 52:58
I think where we are now as Scape is that there’s been this incredible trajectory of thought and research. Like, we know about water in every form and how to shape land and work with policy and regulatory environment relative to land and water, and so that feels like a big body of knowledge, and we’ve also learned how to do engagement really well. And I think the trick with engagement is not just engagement, but it’s translating the engagement into a physical design, and that’s where most people fall down, but so we’ve managed to do that. We’ve done contaminated sites. We worked in remediation, etc. And so I do have two projects on the board right now that I’m kind of, like, clustering under synthetic projects because they are projects that involve all of those different threads of expertise into one very tightly, you know, a tight bundle. One of them is Manresa Wilds, which is this 130-acre new park in Norwalk, Connecticut, and it’s the site of this energy power plant that’s now decommissioned, but the land itself was sort of made. Much of it was made through basically dumping the coal ash onto the ground, and so you have this thing that’s like both astonishing in its kind of beauty and moment of abandonedness, but it’s also, you can’t aesthetically go there and into the bliss of looking at a ruin, right? Because in order to make that site safe for people to access, a lot of transformation is required. So that has like incredibly diverse coastal edges. It has inland wetland. It has a big cluster of buildings. It has remediation. It has coastal restoration, so that kind of loops together a lot of our, what I would say what we’ve learned. And there’s also engagement, so that’s a big one that is particularly exciting because the client is so innovative and so interesting and so forward-looking as well that we’re really being pushed to go beyond. The Austin McCord is the founder of the nonprofit who is advancing that. So that’s one bucket of excitement and big excitement. And then another one is the Chattahoochee Brick Company project, which is a very very different project in Atlanta, Georgia, just on that Chattahoochee Riverlands trail, and that is 75 acres, and that has a very, very different set of parameters, in the sense that we’re working with the descendant community of convict-leased laborers, and these individuals toiled in incredibly unbearable and horrifying conditions on this site of the Chattahoochee Brick Company, where bricks were made and then shipped all over the United States. And so, basically, the entire site is a memorial in a way, and just the challenge of coordinating, MASS memorials group is kind of helping to develop the memorial component, and we have a trails designer and so on. But Scape is really the holding all of these components together. So practically and intellectually, it’s a huge challenge, and also from a kind of just a cultural sense, it’s, I think, probably one of the most significant sites in the United States, if not the most, in terms of really the American story and what has been forgotten and people who have been forgotten. So those are two very exciting projects.

Miljački 56:57
You already have your ideal projects.

Orff 57:04
It is actually true! It is actually true that I feel incredibly, like, overwhelmed in a positive way to have all of Scape’s commitment to these two sites, and of course we have other projects on the board that are also complex and exciting, but those two come to mind because they hit at such a cultural level.

Miljački 57:30
And here’s the last one I have for you: do you have desires or ideas about the ways that we might need to transform the way we teach architecture, urbanism, and landscape to meet the moment? How must we prepare for saving all we can?

Orff 57:55
Yes. Well, I’ve been the director of urban design at Columbia for 11 years. I don’t know if it’s 12 or 11 years, but at the beginning of my tenure there, I really modified the curriculum in a way and helped put engagement and interviewing and, you know, up towards the front, I really added a strong kind of earth sciences ecological sort of dimension to the curriculum, and then also changed the topic of the three studios that comprise it so that they’re very complementary. One, it kind of sounds maybe familiar now through, at this point in the interview. But the New York summer studio being very much focused on the amazing urban transformation that is New York City, you know, from the Lenape, through the Dutch, through the 1811 gridiron and Olmsted and Moses, etc. And a fall studio that’s focused on emergent American cities and social justice issues, and the spring studio focused more on global issues and issues of climate and water. So I guess all I would say is when I think probably those are the things that we should focus on, but I do have, in my own experience, I do feel like we do need to give students more credit about knowing. I think they also have a sense of what they need to know, and I kind of joke about my own experience at the Harvard GSD in the late ’90s, which was, you know, I graduated ’97, but there would be days where in the morning I would be learning about, like, how to grade a road, right or a parking lot with a curb and with red pencil and then shading in the cut and fill in this most direct analog way and doing one point perspectives with a Mayline and then two point perspectives and so there was this rigor I suppose to just like okay, well, this is what it means to be an architect, and then in the afternoon there would be, like, Rem being like, what about China?! And then like, or what about, like Zhuhai and, you know, da da da, and so then I would be then organizing images and writing text about something, so I do feel like in a, in a kind of a hysterical way, I do feel like both of those things are still important, and I don’t want our education now to be so abstract. And I think, if I were to do a little critique of education right now, that there’s just a lot of lip service to ecologies, to this, to multi-species whatever and then it’s not, I’m never sure where the science comes in or where the reality comes into some of these things. So sometimes I feel like we do students a disservice when we set up these frames and then don’t give them the tools to actually move through that information and come up with ideas that can both live in the future and also have some grip to the present reality we’re in, and so I always fall back on that moment. That day where I’m like, Okay, you still have to learn and dig into the hard stuff and get, my father used to call it buckle down, right, it’s like, I’m always putting my seatbelt on and clicking it in, like, okay I have to just buckle down and solve this. So I would encourage students to also get into that mentality of, like, there is a lot to learn. It’s not overwhelming, but you do have to respect the technical side of what we do. But at the same time, there is propositional thinking, and that imagining an alternative future is a big part of it, but often I see just a big gap between those two modes of thinking, where it’s like, you’re either doing apples or oranges. But the reality is, is that those two ways of thinking must intersect in order to do architecture and urban design. Otherwise, you’re just making art, right? You’re just doing a drawing that is appreciated, you know, you can appreciate as an aesthetic object, and there’s certainly valid to that. But that’s not necessarily manifesting in the built environment, and so that’s how I’ve tried to push things, which is pulling both of those facets forward and making sure that they come together in terms of a built environment expression.

Miljački 1:03:10
Excellent, Kate. Thank you very much for talking to me today, and listeners, thank you for listening to this episode of I Would Prefer Not To, produced by myself and Julian Geltman.

Orff 1:03:23
Thank you, Ana.