From waterfront public spaces and facilities to the groundbreaking Living Breakwaters resiliency infrastructure off the coast of Staten Island, Kate Orff and her firm, SCAPE Landscape Architecture, have been at the forefront of ecologically restorative and socially engaged design. As the unfolding climate crisis exacerbates issues of equity in our cities, Orff takes an encompassing view of the environment and considers social justice as a fundamental goal of her work. She was awarded the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 2017 and has been honored by national and local organizations in recent years for her innovative work to mitigate the effects of climate change on the urban coastline. Recently, she was named to the 2023 TIME 100, that magazine’s list of the most influential people in the world.

On May 9, Open House New York and Person Place Thing kicked off a set of live, in-person shows recorded at places meaningful to our guests. Person Place Thing is a long-running public radio program series that asks creatives and leaders in diverse fields to talk about one person, one place, and one thing that are important to them, yielding a new perspective on the featured guest’s work, life, and inspirations.

The conversation between Randy Cohen and Kate Orff will take place in-person at a meaningful place for Orff: the Central Park Arsenal. Listen to the recording to find out why.

The program featured live music by guitarist Adi Horodniceanu.

Kate Orff, RLA, FASLA, is the Founding Principal of SCAPE, a landscape architecture and urban design studio with offices in New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. She is also a Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), where she directs the Urban Design program and co-directs the Center for Resilient Landscapes (CRCL). She is the author of several books including Toward an Urban Ecology (Monacelli, 2016) and co-author, with photographer Richard Misrach, of Petrochemical America (Aperture, 2012). In 2017, she became the first landscape architect to receive the MacArthur Foundation’s ‘Genius’ Fellowship.

Learn more about SCAPE and Kate’s work:

@scape_studio (Twitter, Instagram)

www.scapestudio.com

Randy Cohen’s first professional work was writing humor pieces, essays, and stories for newspapers and magazines (The New Yorker, Harpers, The Atlantic, Young Love Comics). His first television work was writing for “Late Night With David Letterman” for which he won three Emmy awards. His fourth Emmy was for his work on Michael Moore’s “TV Nation.” He received a fifth Emmy as a result of a clerical error, and he kept it. For twelve years he wrote “The Ethicist,” a weekly column for the New York Times Magazine. In 2010, his first play, “The Punishing Blow,” ran at New York’s Clurman Theater. His most recent book, “Be Good: how to navigate the ethics of everything,” was published by Chronicle. He is currently the creator and host of Person Place Thing, a public radio program.

Person Place Thing is produced with the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan and sponsored by WAMC Northeast Public Radio.  An interview show, it is based on this idea: people are particularly engaging when they speak not directly about themselves but about something they care about. Guests talk about one person, one place, and one thing that are important to them. The result?  Surprising stories from great talkers.