Elizabeth K. Meyer

Education

University of Virginia, Master of Landscape Architecture 1982
Cornell University, M.A. Historic Preservation with a Minor in Landscape Architecture History 1983
University of Virginia, B.S. Landscape Architecture 1978

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 producing 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 as well as her teaching 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. In recognition of her scholarly and professional accomplishments, Meyer was elevated as a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) and Council of Educators (CELA), appointed to the US Commission of Fine Arts by President Obama (2012-2020), bestowed the Vincent Scully Award by the National Building Museum (2019), and recognized with UVA’s highest faculty honor, the Thomas Jefferson Award (2023).

Currently Meyer is on research leave and focused on the launch of UVA’s Morven Sustainability Lab (MSL), a place-based, pan-university teaching and research endeavor located on 2900 acres of rural Piedmont land located ten miles from the UVA Grounds.  MSL’s mission is three-fold: to support future-oriented teaching and research that recognize the complexities of the climate crisis will require new narratives, policies, ethics  and practices; to afford our students—the generation that will need to imagine, co-create and implement these changes—meaningful nature-connection experiences impactful enough to bolster their personal well-being and to alter their sense of care and belonging to our home, the Virginia Piedmont and the planet Earth; and to recognize that Morven’s ecological benefits and aesthetic beauty, its fecundity and value, was co-curated, cared for and maintained by the Indigenous people including the Monacan Nation and its ancestors that inhabited this region for 10,000 years and the enslaved people who lived and worked at Dick’s Plantation/Indian Camp/Morven from 1730-1865. Students and faculty in the School of Architecture’s four departments and varied cross-disciplinary programs are invited to participate in the founding of land labs, sustainability/climate adaptation courses and student organizations that will give life to the MSL strategic planning mission and goals.

Meyer continues to be involved with the UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes (CCL) that she founded in 2015. Currently, she directs the annual Landscape Studies Initiative JB Jackson Books Prize and David Coffin Publication Grant and supports CCL Director Andrea Robert’s new cultural landscape programs. She continues to work closely with UVA student research assistants at both Morven and in the Center for Cultural Landscapes. In addition, Meyer is writing a book on the design and social history of Charlottesville Downtown Pedestrian Mall designed by Lawrence Halprin Associates (1973-1976). This builds on research, workshops, a field guide and exhibitions about the Mall that Meyer curated with several UVA MLA students since the early 2000s. In the near future, Meyer will collaborate with Professor Julian Raxworthy on an anthology of her 35 years of writing.