User:Sprybutok/Kate Orff

Early Life and Education
Kate Orff grew up in a once-gated suburban community in Crofton, Maryland to which she has been designed for the use of cars and created on the steadfast idea that oil was what kept modern settlements relevant. During Orff's summers of high school, she worked an odd string of jobs; for one summer, she as a fishmonger and another she worked at a plant nursery. It was at the plant nursery that she learned about plants and began to enjoy the activity of gardening.

Orff attended the University of Virginia in the undergraduate program of Political and Social Thought which was founded by Richard Rorty. The program offered Orff freedom in choosing the path that she wanted to take within her studies. This led to her looking at women’s studies, environmental sciences, sculpture, forest ecology which intertwined the arts and science in the University of Virginia curriculum. It was during this time in her early studies that Kate Orff wrote her thesis on Ecofeminism in which she found connections between environmental degradation, poverty, women’s issues. In addition, Orff learned about architecture school and enrolled in Reuben Rainey’s class who is a well-known teacher of landscape architecture history at the school. During his class, Kate Orff realized that landscape architecture was a combination of many things that she was passionate about; it integrated her interests in science and politics as well as her talent in art and design. While at the University of Virginia, Orff played varsity lacrosse and also coached a high-school girls’ team. She then graduated with Distinction from the Bachelor of Political and Social Thought. Before returning to school in a Master in Landscape Architecture program from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, Kate Off traveled to Chile and worked on a women’s health magazine.

Design Philosophy
Kate Orff's passion for the role that landscape architecture takes in cities has led her to the belief that landscape architects must do more than "beautify"; instead, they must assist in resetting the ecosystems to reconnect people to each other through social spaces that also implement ecological services. She states that, since the formation of the discipline, landscape architects had been working closely with the carbon-centric world; people have been creating wonderful gardens as a focus for the field but has been letting the Earth decay in the back-drop.

To redirect the attention to the planet's ecological systems as well as link them to policy ideas and infrastructure, Kate Orff constructs a framework of engagement for her designs to create a resilient landscape that can handle future threats of the environment in the future sea-level rise and increase wave action. Kate Orff's studio, SCAPE, which she established in 2007, is well known for its ecologically driven projects throughout the world and takes on many projects that emphasize sustainability due to her feelings of responsibility for the environment. In her studio, Orff and her team produce a design that is based on science and research as well as an activist approach.