Elizabeth Meyer

Landscape architecture is a socio-ecological spatial practice with its own vocabularies and theories, yet discourse about the designed landscape is hampered by reliance on interpretations by those outside our field. Since the late 1980s, Meyer has addressed this problem by produced a substantial body of theory and criticism that has altered how practitioners around the world create new landscape imaginaries. Grounded in the materiality and experience of actual sites as well as contemporary cultural issues, Meyer’s public lectures and essays challenge conventional design practice by questioning the separation of aesthetics and sustainability; race theory and urban topography; public space, living systems and non-human species; cultural landscape interpretation and innovative design. Currently Meyer is writing a book, The Margins of Modernity, that reframes the history/theory of modern landscape architecture as a vital, but marginal, practice of city formation and place–making defining this 160-year-old profession’s significance in its hybrid spatial logics, material practices and temporal rhythms.

Companies

• Professor of Landscape Architecture University of Virginia School of Architecture (1993)
• Vice Chairman US Commission of Fine Arts (2012 — 2020)
• Dean and Edward E. Elson Professor of Architecture, Merrill D. Peterson Professor University of Virginia School of Architecture (2014 — 2016)
• PLACE design task force volunteer City of Charlottesville (2012 — 2014)
• Executive Council Member University of Virginia Faculty Senate (2011 — 2014)
• Assistant Professor and Associate Professor Harvard University Graduate School of Design (1988 — 1993)
• Landscape Architect Hanna Olin Ltd, Landscape Architects (1987 — 1988)
• Landscape Architect, Associate EDAW (1982 — 1986)

Education

• MLA University of Virginia (1980 — 1982)
• MA Cornell University (1978 — 1980)
• BS University of Virginia (1974 — 1978)