 Hello. Welcome to Cooper Hewitt's National Design Week, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the National Design Awards. My name is Vasu Genopoulos, Manager of Cooper Hewitt's National Design Awards Program, as well as our transformation programs here. I have the great privilege of working with our award winners all year, and today I am delighted to have this talk with Kate Orff of SCAPE, our winner of the National Design Award for Landscape Architecture. The talk will focus on the designer as a responsible citizen, so let's get started. As a contemporary landscape architect, you've taken on a role as an environmental activist and socially engaged designer. Was there a specific event or series of events when you realized, as a designer, you had a platform to not only discuss issues of the environment and social justice, but also the power to enact change? Well, first of all, I'm so excited for SCAPE to win this award. Our firm is growing and really dynamic, so it comes at a great time for us, so I'm just so thrilled and happy to be here. I would not like to go back and rewrite history and say that there was some lightning bolt that went off that triggered this change. Just to sort of unpack my own history a little bit, or the history of the office, I came to Landscape Architecture. I had a fairly typical suburban type of upbringing. I don't think unless you're at least at the time in the 70s or the 80s, unless you were really a member of the moneyed class that you even knew that Landscape Architecture existed really as a field. I felt like I discovered Landscape Architecture by feeling my way through the dark and landing at University of Virginia as an undergrad, where I was very politically engaged and was in a program called political and social thought. I was really interested in history and activism and weaving these strains together. At the same time, I was taking these courses in the architecture school and doing large-scale sculpture and also in the environmental sciences. It was a very gradual, I will not say the lightning bolt, but I would say there was a gradual churning that began to connect all the dots between those three big things. That led me to realizing that the kinds of things that I was studying in American history, namely we had many sessions on Central Park as this signature space, or democratic space, one of the most renowned spaces of democracy in the world, and then kind of linking that back over to, okay, well, there was a designer and a design team and an agency behind the space. It didn't appear as if by magic. It was created by the hand of people. So I kind of pulled those things together like, okay, I can do that thing. And then that all sort of got wrapped together within this change mindset or sort of manifesto mindset that sort of carried us through. So that gradual change, I would say, helped, you know, I worked in firms and was at Harvard for a while. And then when I landed in New York after I was helped to open the New York office of OMA, the Rem Kool House firm, and then I was kind of thinking like, all right, well, I'm going to start a research agenda. And I started to not look at built, you know, landscapes by landscape architects, but I started to look at the broader landscape around New York City and the wetlands and the marshlands and the New Jersey highlands and the whole ecosystem. That was really the New York ecosystem, and that was way back in 2002. And then really began to focus on Jamaica Bay as a water body and as a place and as a system. And then through this kind of process realized that, okay, as a landscape architect, I need in order to make a change in this, to save this landscape because it's been threatened by excess nitrogen. Anyone been to Jamaica Bay or you know Jamaica Bay? Okay, good. Sometimes I describe it as like, you know, that place that you fly over into JFK airport, but that's really not the best way. But that sort of orients you to, it's this amazing marshland on the edge of town. And so I just realized by writing about it, by mapping out it to the Six Senses Mapping Project, and I just realized that as a way to influence this space, it's a completely different skill set than the traditional landscape architecture. It's a position of politics. It's a position of influencing. It's a position of activism. It's a position of like listening to the activists who are trying to, you know, help preserve, you know, change water quality, etc. So I would just say that for me was this very, very early lesson in a huge mindset shift, which is not in order to be an effective practitioner. I need to do X, Y, and Z, which is typical landscape. I need to have completely different skill set, which are skill sets of convening, of listening, of kind of being in an agency mix and so on. And then that set into motion this oyster-texture project that was here at one of your sister institutions, Museum of Modern Art. So I really got a big megaphone because I was able to, you know, speak and help define ideas set agendas that I think helped the trajectory of the firm and put us on the trajectory we're on today. Definitely. And with so many of your projects, you worked to engage the local community, the 103rd Street Community Garden here was built almost entirely by volunteers. Can you talk a little bit about your process of engaging the local community and navigating any challenges you may encounter? Yeah. I mean, I see designing community engagement processes as one of the kind of absolutely key skill sets for designers in the next decades. Absolutely key. Because we are living in this robust democracy. At the same time, we need to make some very significant changes relative to decarbonizing our economy, changing our physical built landscape so that it is less consumptive of petrochemicals and, you know, replenish, vanishing wetlands, you know, restore biodiversity or at least habitat where we can. So I mean, I would say engaging the community is a key part of that because we also need to do all of these things while remaining wholly and completely focused on, you know, equity and on these kind of core issues of making sure that people whose voices haven't been heard in the past are heard now. So that being said, this kind of concept of, so in the book toward an urban ecology, there's an entire chapter called Engaged. And so we really try to put that listening process at the core of our work. And I think that Scape's work is deeply informed by listening and engagement. And that has helped carry us through to this point. There are many, many different scales of engagement and kinds of engagement. For example, 103rd Street was as simple as listening to everybody on the block, hearing what people needed and kind of sketching a framework which enabled everybody else to just organize themselves and around the building of that thing. At the same time, Scape is doing a master plan or a large scale plan for the Chattahoochee River called the Riverlands and outside of Atlanta, Georgia. This is a 100 mile long landscape in which there are, you know, I can't imagine three sub areas, you know, three, you know, meetings per sub area. Literally if you look at our engagement plan, it kind of boggles the mind in terms of the amount and the creativity that's needed to engage that. So although the scales differ, I would say that we approach the community engagement process with the same positive optimism and, you know, enthusiasm and genuine interest that we engage every other aspect of the firm's work, whether it's, you know, the detail that's being installed on the ground or broad scale mapping projects. So that engagement process is something that is totally worthy in and of itself of design thinking and care, I would say. Could you talk a little bit about your Living Breakwaters project and engagement with the local community and others? Well, so that's the Living Breakwaters project is a project that came out of the Superstorm Sandy after math, you know, this tragedy slash, you know, opportunity to rebuild and rethink our landscape after Superstorm Sandy hit. And so we developed the Living Breakwaters project and, you know, sort of pulling forward threads from Oyster Texture and from that Jamaica Bay research. And so it is a roughly one and a half mile long string of breakwaters that are seated with oysters through the Billion Oyster Project that reduce wave, reduce erosion, help to protect the south shore of Staten Island and rebuild this kind of structural habitat for fin fish and, of course, shellfish. So what I think is unique and innovative about Living Breakwaters are one of the things. I mean, first of all, I feel like we're trying to design relationships between things rather than just think about this physical infrastructure, social infrastructure ecosystems over here. It's a project that's trying to think of all of these aspects at the same time. But another, because I kind of geek out because Scape is also very applied in the real world. So we are at meetings with regulators. We are talking to the Army Corps. We are talking to the state. You know, there's an incredible amount of detail that needs to go into these nuanced conversations. So it's just an exciting project because not just the physical part of that project was funded. We were able to push aspects of the funding toward the ecological restoration and towards the social life on shore. And one of the kind of key principles that we take on in terms of, if you're talking about social outreach, is really to work on and expand existing networks. In this case it was the New York City Public School System and working with the Billion Oyster Project, they have developed a curriculum which is a New York State certified science curriculum. So literally students will be able to kind of participate, seed, monitor this physical infrastructure over time. So that kind of coalition of fishermen and kayakers and school teachers really made this project so much richer and I think so exciting. And I think a big lesson learned from Living Breakwaters is not just that there's the project that exists over here in this space and you're just kind of looking for community members to kind of okay it or approve it. It's that there's this great reciprocity between the power of landscape architecture, the power of the physical project to actually engender coalitions and vice versa. So there's a real sort of back and forth that we I think deeply learned through the development of that project that social life can be sort of fostered and gathered by the envisioning of new and exciting transformative projects and vice versa that projects can sort of be benefit from existing coalitions and so on. So they work together. That's great. It's truly hands-on learning for students and creating the future. So based on your own experiences in the field and with teaching, how should young designers be thinking of approaching a design problem today to address the climate change crisis? Well, so there's a huge question and so I teach at the director of the Columbia Urban Design Program and have really changed the entire curriculum of the Urban Design Program in our very brief three semesters to give students tools to communicate, collaborate, work together, tell stories, map and essentially describe change processes relative to dealing with climate adaptation and mitigation. So in the case of, I'll just give you one example. So in the past five years I've been teaching the studio around just water and global cities. Literally I think you could kind of trace the climate crisis through the lens of water. It hits so many topics. It's so personal. There are trans-border conflicts. I mean, if you look at any water body around the world, you can immediately trace trans-border international conflicts that sort of move around that issue. So I've just gone with a singular focus and brought students around the world to cities as diverse as Rio de Janeiro or in Brazil, to Quenta, Vietnam, to Varanasi, India, to Madurai, India, just all around the world and just kind of have them work together with the faculty to just look very deeply at the sort of local ecosystems, to look very deeply at water issues and propose essentially sort of urban design projects and just answering a pre-defined question that are kind of unpacking those future challenges relative to water, social life, and politics. And as much as I don't feel like any designer would ever say, I've figured out how to solve the climate crisis because it's so much about changing a mindset. It's so much about seeing the world differently and I feel like as much as possible these studios have at least done that sort of paradigm shift or taught in a new way that can at least prepare students to confront, I can't even imagine, the kinds of challenges that we will see in terms of just migration, water quality, collapse of ecosystems that the sort of planners and designers of the future will need to grapple with if we cannot do that now or grapple with it effectively now. Definitely, and I think what you're doing with the Living Breakwaters Project and engaging young students at an early age to start thinking about some of these issues certainly helps pave the way. So along with that, a question from one of our Instagram followers, Libra Ceramics, how does an emerging or beginner artist catch your attention? Ooh, good question. Well, I'll give you an example of someone in the escape office who caught our attention. Her name is Sophie. So she, for example, was a student at Carnegie Mellon University and she sort of, as part of her thesis project, so an earlier book is called Petrochemical America. I hope that you all are familiar with that book. It was with Richard Misrack, the photographer, and it was sort of tracing the impacts of petrochemical extraction on the American landscape at multiple scales. But so Sophie saw that book while a student at Carnegie Mellon and in her region around Pittsburgh there was a new shell cracker, ethylene plant that was going online. Just that is about to manufacture millions of new tons of plastic. And so she kind of self-organized her own exhibit using some of the work from Petrochemical. She went out and kind of protested. She participated in workshops and then she kind of got in contact with our office through that project and through this kind of process sort of like, well, that is somebody who catches my eye because she is sort of a sort of, you know, has a purpose, a sense of purpose. And I think that is what the escape office attracts is, you know, we may not, you know, we think of course we have beautiful work in our portfolio, but I would say equally important to the ability to draw and think is to have that sense of purpose and drive. And so someone like Sophie will definitely kind of be someone who rises to the top in terms of the pile of resumes that's always getting bigger. Could you talk a little more about the makeup of the escape team in terms of backgrounds? Yeah, so we're, we have diverse backgrounds. In fact, we have six principles now and we've organized ourselves. And, you know, I think this is one of these funny things that you don't learn this in design school, which is like, oh, am I a business person now? But, you know, we have very different kind of roles where there's a design role, there's a technical roles, and then there's administrative and managerial roles. So I think that's one of the things that the hard lessons learned in the last, say, 10 years is that design in order to be effective and impactful and in order to create the infrastructure within the office to, you know, be able to deliver on these very large and significant projects, it is much a look in the mirror kind of a process in terms of designing the office in a way where people's strengths are magnified and, you know, that there's this kind of collaborative process. So some offices are structured where there's like 10 different principles and 10 different kind of streams of work, but we're all sort of working on facets of the business. So I think that's fun and it requires communication and it requires collaboration, but it means that we can kind of get to a scale where we can be impactful and deliver these really significant projects. So everything is designed. Well, I think that brings us to the end of our 20-minute conversation. Thank you so much, Kate, for joining us today, and we're again so honored to have Scape as our winner of Landscape Architecture this year. Thank you all for coming, and I hope you enjoy the rest of the evening. Thank you.