Landscape Architecture Fall 2025 Lecture Series: Kate Kennen

Join us in 175 Warren Hall for a lecture with Kate Kennen, founder and president of Offshoots. This lecture is titled "Scaling up! Landscapes of Productive Planting Exploration."

The work at Offshoots aims to alleviate plantings of their traditional maintenance regimes (fertilizer, water, & time) alternatively creating productive landscapes that utilize the power of plants to mitigate pollution (through phytoremediation) and connect regional ecologies. Kate will share a range of work from residential to the infrastructural, where small projects have been used as a testing ground to scale up performative planting concepts that mitigate climate change and urban pollution.

Kate Kennen (Cornell ’98) is founder of Offshoots, Inc., a Boston, MA landscape architecture and horticultural installation practice and full-time professor at Northeastern University.  Her book co-authored with Niall Kirkwood, PHYTO: Principles and Resources for Site Remediation and Landscape Design, translates the science of phytoremediation into an easy-to-understand guide for design professionals.  She grew-up on her family’s garden center in central Massachusetts where she is still trying to convince her dad that there ARE a few landscape architects who know about plants.