Personal Statement

Elizabeth K. Meyer is one of the leading landscape architectural theorists in the United States. In 2010, she was on the MVVA team that won the City+Arch+River design competition for the St. Louis Gateway Arch Grounds and their surroundings. In 2011, she was one of two landscape architects included in the annual DesignIntelligence rankings of Most Admired Educators in the United States. Meyer has lectured at universities on four continents, and published widely on topics concerning contemporary landscape design practice and theory, such as “Site Citations: Grounding the Modern Landscape” in Burns and Kahn’s Site Matters and “The Post-Earth Day Conundrum: Translating Environmental Values into Landscape Design” in Conan’s Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture. Her writings provocatively question conventional norms and assumptions. For instance, in “Uncertain Parks. Disturbed Sites, Citizens and a Risk Society,” Meyer explores the social implications and aesthetic conundrums inherent in the making of new parks on toxic industrial sites. In “Sustaining Beauty. The Performance of Appearance,” she calls for the insertion of aesthetic concerns into a sustainability agenda arguing that without them sustainable design will have a limited impact on the environmental practices and ethics of the public. Her most recent publication, “Slow Landscapes. A New Erotics of Sustainability” is featured in Harvard Design Magazine (Winter 2010). Meyer’s teaching and scholarly interests focus on three areas: the re-discovery and examination of modern landscape theory, the establishment of a robust contemporary practice of landscape criticism, and the idea of design as site interpretation (sites replete with cultural layers as well as natural processes). She is completing a book focused on these concerns, Groundwork. Practices of Modern Landscape Architecture, with support from the UVA School of Architecture Dean’s Office, the Graham Foundation and a Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship. This research informs Meyer’s teaching in her lecture course “Theories of Modern Landscape Architecture” that is a core of the History and Theory offerings in the Department, as well as in seminar electives such as “Topics in Contemporary Landscape Theory.” Recent seminar subjects have included “Situating Sustainability,” “Representing Landscape: Critiques of the Visual” and “The Legacy of Lawrence Halprin.” Meyer has helped shaped the landscape architecture core studio sequence through her first year studio teaching about Sites and Cities, Site as Program, and The Urban Forest as Civic Space that were the subjects of several travel studios to Barcelona between 2001-2008. For the past three years, Meyer has taught an advanced studio focused on Landscape Additions that considers new approaches to adding onto modern landscapes designed by several of the most significant landscape architects of the 20th century. These studios call on students to imagine sites as culturally and ecologically significant, and to create alternatives to the current divide between design and preservation, history and ecology, innovation and conservation. For the next few years, Meyer will be teaching in the advanced-level studios. Meyer joined the UVA faculty in 1993, and has served as Landscape Architecture Department Chair and Director of the Graduate Landscape Architecture Program. Previously, Meyer taught at Harvard Graduate School of Design and Cornell University. She is nationally recognized as an outstanding scholar, studio critic and lecturer with honors, grants and awards from the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, the American Society of Landscape Architects, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the University of Virginia. Meyer, a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects, is a registered landscape architect who worked for EDAW and Hanna/Olin (now, Olin Studio) before beginning her academic career. Since then, she has consulted with several landscape architecture firms including Michael Vergason and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. She stays current with contemporary practice through participation on numerous design competition and professional awards juries, as well as by frequent travel to see new designed landscapes around the globe. Her recent travels and lectures (Sustaining Beauty, Terragrams, and MOMA Second Wave of Modernism) have taken her to the Northwest and Midwestern US, Finland, China, Spain, New Zealand and Australia.