Planned for Staten Island, New York, the Living Breakwaters project will consist of 4,000 feet of storm surge-fighting sea walls that double as oyster reefs and fish habitat. Construction will begin in 2018, and it might be Orff's most ambitious project to date.
Living Breakwaters received $60 million in HUD funding in 2014.
Construction on the Red Hook Point development, which features offices, a public park, an event space, and shops, began in late 2016. Scape designed the project's green roofs (which capture and slow down water flow) as well as an esplanade that features tidal ecosystems.
It will be completed in 2019.
The Dune Co-Habitat was designed in 2014 to protect New York City's Far Rockaway Beach from future storm surges. The 80-acre plan calls for building a neighborhood of houses on raised platforms, and planting dunes as a natural flood defense.
In 2016, New York City's Harlem neighborhood got a colorful Scape-designed playground, called Blake Hobbs Play-Za. It replaced a dilapidated asphalt play lot.
Orff has also worked on several projects that have educational components. Scape's De-constructed Salt Marsh proposes re-purposing a collapsed pier in Sunset Park, Brooklyn into a public learning laboratory for intertidal habitat and harbor ecology.
The Blue Wall Center — completed in 2010 outside Cleveland, South Carolina — transformed a former 165-acre camp site into a visitor's center, where people can learn about the surrounding ecosystem.
The Gowanus Lowlands project proposes transforming a Brooklyn neighborhood, known for its federal Superfund site, into a thriving park with vegetable gardens. The design was unveiled in summer 2017.
Orff and her firm Scape Studio arre known for designing green spaces for urban places. Most of their projects center in New York City, but they also work across the US and abroad.
In 2011, she gave a TED Talk about Scape's Oyster-tecture proposal, an active oyster reef that could promote biodiversity and protect low-lying areas from sea level rise in the New York Harbor. Each oyster would filter up to 50 gallons of water per day, removing nitrogen, algae, and other pollutants.
