SCAPE founder and Columbia GSAPP Associate Professor Katherine Orff will succeed leading urban housing authority Professor Richard Plunz as the new GSAPP Director of the Urban Design Program starting this June. As a longtime GSAPP and Urban Design Program faculty member and landscape architect, Orff is best known for her eco-sensitive and resilient approach in her projects that integrate urban design, landscape design, and architecture.

Strongly reflecting SCAPE's design philosophy, Orff plans to expand the Program with an emphasis on interdisciplinary research and engagement in dealing with timely issues of climate change and social topics. "My goal is to magnify the social and humanitarian ethos that the Program is well known for, and bring it together with themes of infrastructure, urbanism and climate dynamics," Orff said in a statement. 

Evidently, Orff's work throughout her time in Columbia is heavy in collaboration. In the past, she has led various multi-disciplinary collaborations and taught joint seminars with the MS in Sustainability Management Program. Her joint studios with the Earth Institute and the Real Estate Development Program focused on sustainable development, community-based adaptation models and of course, resiliency.

One of SCAPE's recent and distinctive projects is Living Breakwaters for Raritan Bay, located between New York and New Jersey. The coastal resiliency project made a name for itself in winning the 2014 Buckminster Fuller Challenge as well as being selected as one of six winning proposals in the U.S. Department of HUD's post-Hurricane Sandy Rebuild by Design Initiative. Based on the Billion Oysters Project model, Living Breakwaters uses "oyster-tecture" to protect Staten Island from future storms, revive maritime ecosystems, and better connect residents and students to their local waterfront.