Kate Orff in the Louisiana Channel
Kate Orff (Photo: Screenshot from “Kate Orff: This magical thing about landscapes”)
A new video of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art's Louisiana Channel profile is the landscape architect Kate Orff, foundation of Scape and professor at Columbia University. Orff speaks in Scapes Lower Manhattan Studio and discusses her background what she has led to the landscape architecture and what she tries to achieve with living breakwaters and other projects.
Kate Orff has been a familiar name since at least 2017 when she received a recipient of a Macarthur -Genius scholarship -one of the few people in the areas of architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning that have received such an award. Orff received the scholarship for “designing adaptive and resilient urban habitats and encouraged the residents to be active administrators of the ecological systems on which our built environment is based”. Then she received attention in 2023 when the Living Breakwaters project from Scape won this year's Obel Award. The jury described living breakwaters as “a visionary project that is concerned with the full task of adaptation and has the ability to inspire and positively influence coastal lines endangered worldwide”.
Pictures of living breakwaters and other Scape projects, including Tom Lee Park in Memphis and China Basin Park in San Francisco, are interspersed with Orff in their New York studio. See the 19-minute video below or on the Louisiana Channel website.