Architect Kate Orff sees the oyster as an agent of urban change. Bundled into beds and sunk into city rivers, oysters slurp up pollution and make legendarily dirty waters clean -- thus driving even more innovation in "oyster-tecture." Dr Orff shares her vision for an urban landscape that links nature and humanity for mutual benefit.
Kate Orff is a professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where she's director of the Urban Landscape Lab. She's the co-editor of the new book Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Park [Amazon UK; Amazon US], about the Gateway National Recreation Area, a vast and underused tract of land spreading across the coastline of Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island and New Jersey.
Dr Orff steps out of the ivory towers too. She is a principal of SCAPE, a landscape architecture and urban design office with projects ranging from a 1,000-square-foot pocket park in Brooklyn to a 100-acre environmental center in Greenville, SC, to a 1000-acre landfill regeneration project in Dublin, Ireland.
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