#kate orff

[higherentity]

[strathshepard]

The Seas Are Rising. Could Oysters Protect Us?

Kate Orff photographed by Thomas Prior

[strathshepard]

via The New Yorker: Donaldsonville, Louisiana, in 2010. Landscape architect Kate Orff and the photographer Richard Misrach traveled through the Lower Mississippi Valley, the nation’s largest floodplain, after the BP oil spill.

[yyflandscape-blog]

Week5

Kate Orff:

In Kate’s declaration, she clarified the importance of public engagement in the design process. Among the different services that Kate Orff’s SCAPE studio offers, Public Engagement is among the most emphasized. They believe that communities are completely integral to the design process. In light of this, SCAPE organizes and facilitates productive public processes and creates open and accessible engagement tools for their Clients, with the greater goal of enabling dialogue and ethos of civic participation. For example, Town Branch Water Walk public exhibition in Lexington, Kentucky. This project was the result of a grant received from the Department of Environmental Quality to develop a public education campaign about urban water system that could complement the Town Branch redevelopment project. The project serves as self-guided tour of downtown Lexington’s formerly hidden water body (Town Branch Creek) coupled with content gathered by students from the University of Kentucky. The design intervention is not a physical landscape, but a communication tool utilizing podcasts, maps, and walks to offer an engaging and interpretive experience. By sharing how water system and the people are locally and globally interrelated, the Town Branch Water Walk successfully links the history, culture, and ecology of the city. For the development of future landscape design should combine the social needs with ecological consideration to create a holistic,collaborative, contextual working process.  Kate Orff’s activist and visionary work on design for climate dynamics has been shared and developed in collaboration with arts institutions, governments, and scholars worldwide.She studied political and social in undergraduate school, and that background affected her in the future landscape design which she called eco-feminism, and she also tried to connect feminism into design. For the public engagement idea, she tried not only to directly make people engage but tried to have people think about the city a little bit more than just accepting what is given to them. She thought she need to proactively build constituencies for the projects. 

[talkingarchitects]

Columbia GSAPP: Cities and Climate Action

"A discussion about the critical role that cities play in driving the agenda on climate change, and the steps federal governments must take to assist cities in their efforts to respond to the vast environmental, economic, and cultural impacts. Featuring presentations by former and current city government officials from New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, and New York City. Speakers: Adam Freed, Principal, Bloomberg Associates, and former Deputy Director, NYC Mayor’s Office of Sustainability Jeffrey Hebert, Deputy Mayor & Chief Resilience Officer, The City of New Orleans Kate Orff, Founder, SCAPE, and Associate Professor & Director of Urban Design program, Columbia GSAPP Rodrigo Rosa, Visiting Research Scholar, Columbia University, and Legislative Consultant, Brazil Federal Senate Weiping Wu, Professor & Director of Urban Planning program, Columbia GSAPP Moderated by Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic, The New York Times, and adjunct professor, Columbia GSAPP."

[archpaper]

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The Karst Commons is the centerpiece of SCAPE’s network of parks and paths that use a buried creek to revitalize Lexington, Kentucky’s downtown. (Courtesy SCAPE Landsacpe Architecture)

(Courtesy SCAPE Landsacpe Architecture)

(Courtesy SCAPE Landsacpe Architecture)

(Courtesy SCAPE Landsacpe Architecture)

(Courtesy SCAPE Landsacpe Architecture)

(Courtesy SCAPE Landsacpe Architecture)

(Courtesy SCAPE Landsacpe Architecture)

(Courtesy SCAPE Landsacpe Architecture)

(Courtesy SCAPE Landsacpe Architecture)

(Courtesy SCAPE Landsacpe Architecture)

(Courtesy SCAPE Landsacpe Architecture)

Most Lexingtonians don’t know it, but the porous limestone landscape under their feet—called karst—created their bluegrass identity. The basic water that flows through karst reportedly makes their grass grow green, their racehorses grow strong, and their bourbon taste smooth. So when downtown Lexington held a competition to revitalize and re-pedestrianize the concrete, car-driven downtown, New York–based SCAPE Landscape Architecture chose to reveal and celebrate its geology. As SCAPE founder and partner Kate Orff said, the Town Branch Commons Corridor project is “a reinterpretation, a transformation of the karst landscape into public space.”

(Courtesy SCAPE Landsacpe Architecture)

The ambitious project, which just received a major $14.1 million funding boost from the U.S. Department of Transportation, will carve pedestrian and bike paths through the heart of Lexington, creating new green spaces and linking with regional trails at both ends. To create freshwater pools—SCAPE calls them “karst windows,” in reference to similar naturally occurring formations—the design will tap old culverts (essentially large pipes) that previously kept Lexington’s karst water out of sight.

The trail will be narrow in some areas, but wide for the Karst Commons, a new public plaza and park at the project’s northern end that will feature multiple “habitat rooms,” an amphitheater, and recreation areas. The park can flood safely in a deluge. “There’s no site here, it’s a hybrid project,” said Orff. “Sidewalk here, empty lot there, parking lot there… The thread of water means each entity has to somehow come in contact with it and embrace it.”

What’s this chart? This article is part of a series—originally appearing in our Oct. 12 issue—that focuses on how water is shaping today’s landscape architecture and urbanism. Communities face deluges and droughts—for some, the stakes can be survival itself, but others see opportunities for decadence. Here’s where this project stands—click here to see the rest! (AN)

The road to realizing the project—now in schematic design—has been long. After winning the 2013 competition, SCAPE worked with the University of Kentucky and the Lexington Downtown Development Authority to foster public support. They created a large model of the city’s hidden Town Branch Creek, paired with self-guided podcast tours, that generated excitement and helped propel the project. The karst, citizens realized, was part of the bluegrass identity they hold dear (and market to tourists). “Here it’s all about finding a unique identity framed around a cultural and geological history of a place,” said Gena Wirth, SCAPE design principal. “What’s replicable is the multipurpose infrastructure that unites the city, its story, and its systems.”

SCAPE turns Lexington, Kentucky’s long-buried water into an asset Most Lexingtonians don’t know it, but the porous limestone landscape under their feet—called karst—created their bluegrass identity.

[archpaper]

SCAPE's Kate Orff to take over GSAPP's Urban Design Program

SCAPE’s Kate Orff to take over GSAPP’s Urban Design Program

Kate Orff. (Courtesy SCAPE)

Kate Orff, the founder of SCAPE Landscape Architecture, will head up the Urban Design Program at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

(more…)

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[archpaper]

American Academy of Arts and Letters announces 2015 architecture awards

American Academy of Arts and Letters announces 2015 architecture awards

O’Donnell + Tuomey’s Lewis Glucksman Gallery. (John Lord / Flickr)

A star-studded jury has selected the winners of the American Academy of Arts and Letters‘ 2015 architecture prizes. Elizabeth Diller (chairman), Henry N. Cobb, Peter Eisenman, Kenneth Frampton, Michael Graves, Richard Meier, Laurie Olin, Cesar Pelli, Billie Tsien, and Tod Williams chose the awardees from among 41 nominations.

(mo…

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