Orff is a registered landscape architect and the founder of SCAPE, an award winning 70-person professional practice based in lower Manhattan, where she directs the design of all projects. The firm has won National and local American Society of Landscape Architecture Awards for built projects, planning and communications work, and the work of the office has been featured on the cover of Landscape Architecture magazine, LA China and Topos, and in The New York Times, New Yorker and Economist, among other publications.
As a Professor at Columbia and as a practicing professional, she has advanced concepts of sustainable planning and urban design at multiple scales. Orff recently contributed the essay “Mending the Landscape” to the publication All We Can Save (One World, 2020). Her book and traveling exhibit with Richard Misrach titled PETROCHEMICAL AMERICA (Aperture Foundation, 2012) draws a cognitive map of climate change causes and effects and anticipates future planning challenges for the American landscape. In the New York region, SCAPE’s Living Breakwaters project was awarded $60 million in CDBG-DR funding by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development as part of the Rebuild by Design Initiative. This joint physical-social project in Raritan Bay helps protect Staten Island from future storms, enhances maritime ecosystems and connects residents and students to the shoreline via the Billion Oysters Project curriculum.
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Images, clockwise from top left: Living Breakwaters at sunrise, courtesy SCAPE and Ty Cole; Atlantic blue crab on Breakwater ‘F’, courtesy SCAPE; Tom Lee Park, courtesy Tom Harris; Tom Lee Park Community Batture, courtesy SCAPE + John Donnelly.
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