Elizabeth Meyer

BS, University of Virginia;
MA, Cornell;
MLA, University of Virginia.

Associate Professor

Elizabeth K. Meyer is one of the leading landscape architectural theorists in the United States. She 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 Carol Burns and Andrea Kahn’s Site Matters and The Post-Earth Day Conundrum: Translating Environmental Values into Landscape Design in Michel Conan’s Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture. Her writings provocatively question conventional norms and assumptions. 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.

Meyer’s teaching and scholarly interests focus on three areas: the recovery and examination of modern landscape design 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 and Representing Landscape: Critiques of the Visual” 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. This year, Meyer taught an advanced studio focused on Landscape Additions that considered new approaches to adding onto a modern landscape designed by one of the most significant landscape architects of the 20th century. This studio called on students to image sites as culturally and ecologically significant, and to create alternatives to the current divide between design and preservation, 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 and teacher with honors and awards from the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, the American Society of Landscape Architects, 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 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 and upcoming travels to lecture internationally include China, Spain, England, New Zealand and Australia.