Overview

Harvard GSD’s Department of Landscape Architecture presents a public lecture by Kate Orff, founder of SCAPE and Professor at Columbia GSAPP, titled “Throughlines.” The lecture takes place in Piper Auditorium, Gund Hall, on April 7, 2026, and is free and open to the public, with a live stream available on the GSD event page at start time. The event is hosted by GSD faculty member Gary R. Hilderbrand and supported by the Melissa Kaish and Jonathan Dorfman Makers Fund.

The lecture carries particular weight as a return: Orff was a student at Gund Hall in the mid-1990s, and the title “Throughlines” signals a retrospective arc, drawing connections across three decades of practice, research, writing, and activism in landscape architecture. It is structured as a reflective account of how a body of work coheres over time rather than as a project presentation.

Focus

The lecture draws throughlines across 30 years of work since Orff’s time at the GSD, linking research, publications, and landscape projects along a trajectory of thought and action. The central concern running through SCAPE’s practice is retooling landscape architecture as a discipline to respond to climate uncertainty, creating spaces that simultaneously address ecological resilience and social life.

Orff’s practice has consistently operated across scales, from site-specific public installations to large-scale coastal infrastructure, and across modes, from built work to publications, advocacy, and research. The “Throughlines” framing suggests the lecture will not compartmentalize these but will instead trace the conceptual and methodological threads that connect them, offering a model of how a contemporary landscape practice can maintain coherence across radically different project types and contexts.

Retooling the practice of landscape architecture relative to the uncertainty of climate change and creating spaces to foster social life.
Kate Orff, SCAPE / GSD Lecture Description, 2026

Program

Lecture Format

The lecture runs ninety minutes in Piper Auditorium. Unlike typical project-by-project presentations, the “Throughlines” format is explicitly retrospective, meaning Orff will draw connections across her 30-year body of work rather than focus on a single project or recent output. The GSD notes that no recording of the event will be available after the lecture, making live attendance or streaming the only access point.

Related Work

The lecture connects to a prior GSD appearance by Orff in 2017 (the Sylvester Baxter Lecture, “Toward an Urban Ecology”) and to the published GSD feature “Flood Control as a Social Movement: Coastal Communities Adapt to a Wetter Reality” (December 2024), which documented SCAPE’s Rockaway studio and community engagement work. These reference points help situate the 2026 lecture within an ongoing engagement between Orff’s practice and the GSD’s research agenda around urban ecology and climate resilience.

Speaker

Kate Orff is the founder of SCAPE, a landscape architecture and urban design studio based in New York. She is a Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), with a joint appointment in Columbia’s Climate School. In 2017, she became the first landscape architect to receive the MacArthur Foundation’s “Genius” Fellowship. Her work spans coastal resilience infrastructure, design research, public space, and community engagement, with a sustained focus on the intersections of ecology, climate, and social equity in the built environment.

Audience

The lecture is open to the public with live streaming, making it accessible beyond the GSD campus. Its primary audience is landscape architecture students, practitioners, and researchers engaged with climate resilience, ecological urbanism, and the role of design practice in addressing systemic environmental challenges. The retrospective format also makes it valuable for those interested in how a significant contemporary practice has evolved methodologically over three decades.

Event Details