Beth Meyer
Education
University of Virginia, Master of Landscape Architecture; Cornell University, M.A. Historic Preservation with a Minor in Landscape Architecture History; University of Virginia, B.S. Landscape Architecture
Biography
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.