How It Started...How It's Going: Stories and Struggles in Practice - 1.25 PDH (LA CES/non-HSW)

Recorded On: 09/17/2026

Photos of impeccable landscapes earn accolades, but they can mask the hard decisions, false starts, trials, and tribulations of everyday practice. Three women leaders from different generations and geographies trace the arc of their careers, sharing stories and struggles from the frontlines of practice that can inspire all to persevere.

Learning objectives:

Examine how three practitioners formed their practices and what shaped their motivation to persevere despite many challenges.
Build resilience strategies for a complex and ever-changing business environment and identify approaches to address challenges specific to women-owned practices.
Analyze the complexity and contradictions that converge in building a practice, and how different practice goals translate into different design business models.
Compare the stories of three different founders to identify diverse pathways through landscape architectural practice applicable to your own career.

Kate Orff, FASLA

Founder and President

SCAPE

Kate Orff is the founder of SCAPE, a landscape architecture and urban design practices with offices in New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. She is also a Professor at Columbia University. Kate is the author of Toward an Urban Ecology (2016) and Petrochemical America (2012) with the photographer Richard Misrach. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017.

Jennifer Guthrie, FASLA

Founding Principal

GGN

As a founding partner of GGN, Jennifer Guthrie's design leadership merges a guiding, experiential vision with innovative and precise detailing. Her work ranges broadly to encompass urban districts of green streets and mixed-use housing, public squares, rooftop gardens, urban farms, and cultural institutions. She also oversees the management of GGN’s highly complex projects and is responsible for the financial arm of the practice.

Jennifer is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects (Seattle). GGN was the recipient of the 2017 ASLA National Landscape Architecture Firm Award.

Andrea Cochran, FASLA

Founder / President

Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture

Andrea Cochran, FASLA is founder and principal of San Francisco-based Andrea Cochran Landscape Architecture and has been practicing landscape architecture in the Bay Area for over thirty years. Known for seamlessly interweaving sustainable landscapes, art, and architecture, her designs highlight the experiential qualities of the built environment. Her firm has garnered numerous design awards, most notably the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award in Landscape Architecture. In 2014 Andrea was honored with the ASLA Design Medal, the second woman to receive this award. A monograph of her firm’s work was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2009.