ESSAYS by Kate Orff

"New Energy Landscapes" The Huffington Post, September 28, 2012

"Oyster-tecture" in Rising Currents: Projects for New York's Waterfront, edited by Barry Bergdoll, the Museum of Modern Art, 2011

"Cosmopolitan Ecologies" in Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Parks, eds. Kate Orff et al. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2011, 50-73

Written by SCAPE.

THE ARCHITECTS NEWSPAPER no. 03
New York Architecture and Design

The beloved Greenwich Village space - and one of the most famous small parks in the world - is about to receive a redesign, courtesy of the city. Landscape architect Kate Orff critiques the newly unveiled redesign of this iconic urban space.

Written by SCAPE.

VOLUME no.1
Archis + AMO + C-LAB (2005)

Landscape always represents a compromise. As mediator of the effects of modernization, as organizer of parkhig lots and decorator of off-ramps, as "green" buffer of market development and developer’s olive branch, as fixer and go-between, we have had 200 years of taining in negotiating the natural and artificial. As the footprint of human settlement blankets more than a third of the earth’s territory - some put the figure at 95% - landscape is now charged with resolving dysfunctionalities that exist on a global scale...

Written by SCAPE.

LAND FORUM no.14
Spacemaker Press (2002)

Here we go again. Another "international park competition"! What can we learn this time? Fresh Kills on Staten Island, New York - more than 2,000 acres of garbage mounds rising 225 feet above sea level - is one of the largest and most complex sites ever presented to landscape architects for consideration. The scale of the problem stretched thin and made legible two ultimately opposite approaches to design, evidenced at a jury presentation by the five finalists on December 15th. That morning, I caught two presentations over the course of three hours: one by Hargreaves Associates, the other by Field Operations. The following are my observations of the day’s events-as well as some preliminary thoughts...

Written by SCAPE.

GREAT LEAP FORWARD / Harvard Design School Project on the City
Taschen (2002)

In Zhuhai's remote Western District, 12,000 tons of dynamite systematically explode a nearby mountain range. The series of detonated blasts, said to be heard from as far away as Macau, eventually clear a 100-kilometer road from Zhuhai’s Eastern District to its brand-new airport. Alongside the highway, tracts of mangrove forest are in-filled with truckloads of rubble. creating an expanse of flat developable land in all directions...

Written by SCAPE.