Kate Orff
Founder, SCAPE landscape architecture and Professor Columbia University
Kate Orff, FASLA is the Founder of SCAPE (www.scapestudio.com) and a Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation, where she directs the Urban Design Program. (www.arch.columbia.edu)”
Why women? Why climate change? Why Now?
I can't put it any better than the editors of the book "All We Can Save" (allwecansave.earth) the climate crisis is a leadership crisis. It's also about more than cutting carbon and proceeding with business as usual. We have to lead with hearth, joy, strength and vision of the more just equitable world that is being made.
What is the biggest challenge facing women leaders in male dominated field and how to overcome them?
There are definitely biases against women in the construction field. I've been making, designing building things my whole life, and still faced skepticism as to whether a woman -led firm can deliver on construction projects and work on sites. Please ! Enough of this.
What are the pressing issues you are contributing as a landscape architect for tackle climate change?
My book with Richard Misrach Petrochemical America (Aperture, 2012) outlined, depicted and linked up cycles of extraction, waste, and displacement in the American landscape. The accompanying glossary shone a spotlight on organizations and policies that were making an impact. Since its founding, SCAPE has focused on design for climate adaptation, biodiversity, and social life. Our book Toward an Urban Ecology (Monacelli, 2016) describes projects and strategies that can make a difference at whatever scale you are working at. As a teacher, I've led complex interdisciplinary global studios over many years that center water in the imagination of future cities that engage the next generation in tackling issues of justice and ecology.
How you approach your business/ your research as a woman who lead?
I try to lead by example, by inspiration, and to form teams of complementary skill sets. I was an athlete in high school and college and feel like I'm still operating as a team captain or coach, trying to get the best out of everyone.
What is the most frustrating moment/comment you’ve heard as a woman who leads in the profession?
I was giving a keynote lecture and sitting next to the brilliant architect Kengo Kuma and one of the organizers asked me if I was Kengo Kuma's assistant! He was more embarrassed than I was. The other series of frustrations center around construction work and work in the field. It's just harder to build that credibility when you are a woman. Honestly, women need to forge new and better paths in landscape that foreground communities and ecosystems.
What’s the most important risk you took and why?
I've just always done what I think is important and interesting and have not worried about trying to please anyone else, or worry about not being liked. I also took time to have a meaningful marriage, and kids and have not worried about "missing out" on anything.
They say “Gender Equality Means Business” -- what do you think about that?
The SCAPE office is a diverse office with LGBTQ staff and and increasingly BIPOC staff. It is not just gender equality but having a range of backgrounds and perspectives that makes an office function more like an ecosystem and less like an org chart.
How your work contributes to other women?
I've brought on three amazing women as principals in the firm, Pippa Brashear, Gena Wirth and Alexis Landes who excel and amaze me every day with their excellence and drive. I've always looked to mentor or be responsive to people wherever they are in life, or for whatever they need.
What advice would you give to the next generation of female design leaders?
Go for it ! Change the paradigm - don't accept the inherited model of private practice and the aura of the singular brilliant male practitioner that has dominated the last decades. Change it up, work in the public sector, work in collectives, bring together policy, design and activism in whatever way you can.