BY BRADFORD MCKEE
Kate Orff, ASLA. Image courtesy of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
FROM THE UPCOMING NOVEMBER 2017 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.
Kate Orff, ASLA, became the first landscape architect to receive a MacArthur Foundation fellowship, which carries a $625,000 award over five years for ?originality, insight, and potential.? Orff was among 24 fellows named by the foundation today, who also included artists, activists, scientists, and historians.
Orff is the founder of SCAPE Landscape Architecture in New York, and the director of the urban design program at Columbia University?s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. The firm?s work has achieved wide renown in recent years for its novel and intensely collaborative approaches to addressing climate change, urbanization, and species survival. The Living Breakwaters proposal for Staten Island?s northern shoreline. Image from Toward an Urban Ecology, Kate Orff and SCAPE Landscape Architecture.
The firm?s best-known project, Living Breakwaters, is scheduled to begin construction next year off the north shore of Staten Island, having won funding from the Rebuild by Design competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The competition, begun after Superstorm Sandy in 2012 to find defenses for the New York and New Jersey region against rising sea levels, realizes a proposal Orff first brought forth for the Museum of Modern Art?s Rising Cu...