简介

Elizabeth Meyer, a landscape architect, theorist and critic, 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. For the last three years, DesignIntelligence has recognized Meyer as one of the most admired design educators in the United States. Her teaching and scholarship have garnered honors, grants and awards from the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, the American Society of Landscape Architects, the Graham Foundation, 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 Alexandria and Hanna/Olin (now, Olin Partnership) in Philadelphia before beginning her academic career. Since then, she has consulted with several landscape architecture firms including Chris Counts Studio, Michael Vergason and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, and continues to advise firms working on significant historic and cultural landscapes. Meyer was part of the MVVA Team that won the City+Arch+River competition in 2010 that focused on revitalizing the context around the St. Louis Gateway Arch Grounds, a modernist landmark designed by Eero Saarinen and Daniel Kiley. She has served on ten national design competition juries over the past twenty years; most recently she served on the jury for Rethink. Restore. Rebuild, the Trust for the National Mall’s design competition for three sites within the monumental core landscape. In 2012, President Obama appointed her to the US Commission of Fine Arts, the design review board for Washington, DC’s monumental core as well as major public buildings and public spaces within the boundaries of the 1902 McMillan Commission plan for the District of Columbia. 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. Meyer’s theoretical writings interrogate landscape modernity as well as the contemporary conditions of landscape design. While addressing divergent topics, Meyer’s theoretical approach is simultaneously grounded in the particularities of built works and engaged with cultural theory and environmental history. Her most recent publications include a manifesto, “Sustaining Beauty” exploring the entanglement of aesthetics, environmental ethics, and lived experience. In critical essays of new projects in New Zealand, “Slow Landscapes,” and Australia, “Grafting, splicing, hybridizing: the strange beauties of the Australian Garden,” she has probed the affective and ecological performance of landscape immersion and experience. This research informs Meyer’s teaching in her lecture course “Theories of Modern Landscape Architecture” that is a core of the Department’s History and Theory offerings, as well as in seminar electives such as “Cultural Landscapes”, “Topics in Contemporary Landscape Theory.” Recent seminar subjects have included “Public Space,” “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. More recently, Meyer has taught advanced studios that speculate about “Landscape Additions” to significant designed landscapes. These studios called on students to imagine sites as culturally and ecologically significant, and to create alternative approaches to the current divide between design and preservation, history and ecology, innovation and conservation. Meyer is extending these concerns to the formation of a new transdisciplinary Center for Cultural Landscapes in the School of Architecture, an endeavor that will take shape over the next couple of years. Two of the pilot projects include the formation of a Virginia cultural landscape atlas, and research collaborations with The Cultural Landscape Foundation (Washington, DC) and colleagues at VA Tech, on the What’s Out There Virginia project.