Interview: Elizabeth Meyer

Professor Elizabeth Meyer is a landscape architect, theorist and critic at the University of Virginia, where she has served as Landscape Architecture Department Chair, Director of the Graduate Landscape Architecture Program, Dean and Edward E. Elson Professor. 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 and the National Endowment for the Arts. Professor Meyer is an ASLA Fellow and advises leading firms working on significant historic and cultural landscapes.

In your manifesto, Sustaining Beauty and the follow up Beyond Sustaining Beauty, you argue that the aesthetic experiences in landscape are essential for sustainability. What is the relationship between aesthetics and sustainability?

The primary point that I wanted to make in the manifesto was that focusing solely on ecological performance was limiting the effectiveness of design and that unless there was a major change in how the larger public perceived and felt connected to the bio-physical world, all of the ‘green bandaids’ in design (e.g. rain gardens or high-performance landscape infrastructure) weren’t going to be enough, because a truly sustainable community requires changes to everyday practices and a larger re-imagination of the relationship between humans and the non-human world.

Through explorations in my earlier work I realized that aesthetic experience was fundamentally relational—it has to do with effects, being in the world, seeing and encountering, and how this affects one’s psyche. Aesthetics is the art and science of perception, not just a formal category of how something looks. As I started thinking about the issues of perception and relationships, I realized that many of the people who talk about being environmentalists, mention an encounter they had as a ‘free-range kid’, such as a relationship to a creek, water body or forest patch. They learnt more later because they came to wonder and care about that place. And that was a relationship—it wasn’t data or information or knowledge; it was felt.

I think if you care about the sustainability or resilience of the built environment, you have to change how people feel about the world, not just change the ecological performance of a place. So I would say that there are four components to sustainability— there’s environmental and ecological performance; there’s a concern for social equity; a need for economic prosperity; but a fourth issue is aesthetic experience of all types and not just beauty.

Why do you think sustainability is so obsessed with technology, quantification and technical considerations?

In the culture that we live in—a neoliberal, capitalistic economy—there’s such a desire and need to quantify. Whether it’s the push for evidence based design, where all of a sudden, lab scientists have more say than theoretical scientists (you can see that in our fields too), I think part of it is being part of the neo-liberal capitalist economy where the bottom line is how much something is financially worth. That has fuelled the interest in ecosystem services with particular focus on the regulating and providing of services that water, soil, plants and wildlife give to human beings. I have explored ecosystem services in relationship to aesthetics and for example, the UN Millennium Goals/Assessment helped progress thinking on the importance of quantifying, measuring, exchanging ecosystem services and these include a category called cultural services. Within that category are things like spiritual sites, recreational and aesthetics. There is more work to be done here on qualitative metrics related to the role of aesthetics in ecosystem services. I do think that even scientists recognize that the value of qualitative metrics, but we as designers haven’t been good at claiming that category. We’ve gone down the modernist, functionalist, technologist routes instead of arguing for qualitative metrics that design can offer. I’m intrigued by new research between neuroscience, environmental psychology and design for which qualitative metrics can result from, and frankly, I think a lot of it can also surface from the narratives of oral histories from people in particular communities.

Do you think we can convince policy and decisionmakers that the issues you’re talking about—ethical agency, landscape beauty, aesthetics, deserve as much or more devotion than dominant empirical science?

I think part of the answer to that comes from the accounts of scientists, environmentalists and designers who talk about their own childhood and early adult experiences. I have former students (e.g. from anthropology and the liberal arts), as well as ecologists (e.g. Stewart Pickett) and colleagues (Kristina Hill) who all talk about the power of narrative as an art of rhetoric and persuasion. We have a tendency to think that we have to quantify things but stories and narratives neurologically connect with people in very powerful ways. I have a friend who’s a psychotherapist and she talks about the fact that the stories we tell about each other actually change the structure of our brain, help us to not only deal with trauma but also to re-imagine new habits. So we have to find the right form for these narratives, they may not all be written, they may be a combination of info-graphics and writing that explain the powerful connections in terms of people’s public health and wellbeing that have been made through their everyday experiences in constructed or found landscapes in their communities. There’s a lot of potential there, if people are collaborating, particularly with anthropologists, environmental psychologists and public health professionals.

I think to see the role of some landscape architects, not just in making, not just in criticizing, but in communicating and to realize the power of that. I think that professional organisations such as ASLA in America—while they do a lot of things very well—they haven’t used their role as a central clearinghouse for our profession in this way yet. I think that that’s a logical place for that to be a primary role, as some other professions are probably doing this better.

Culturally, can we shift to appreciating the beauty in productive, working, and abandoned landscapes in the urban context? We seem to value wildness or a wild aesthetic in non-urban locations but in cities the instinct still seems to be to ‘scape’ everything, with aesthetic tastes still entrenched in formalism and approaches that dominate and subjugate natural systems?

That’s a great question, I think about that a lot because of my close friend and colleague Julie Bargmann is really interested in the urban wild, spontaneous vegetation and the role that a landscape architect could play in curating that and not destroying it. I think there’s a couple of things to keep in mind here. I already think that there’s a generational change. There is much more interest in the urban wild from an aesthetics of ‘thrift’, understanding that things that work have their own intrinsic beauty, that conceptions of beauty and aesthetics change over time and they change over time in relationship to changing social conditions and political conditions, not just design conditions, and I think we have to recognize this. The philosopher Kate Soper, in an essay on cultural hedonism and aesthetic reenvisioning, talks about the fact that there are already existing spatial practices that are connected to new forms of sustainability and new conceptions of beauty. We just need to be aware of those. So I think about, in the United States, the number of young people right out of school who are drawn to live in cities like Detroit or New Orleans, that have radically different urban landscapes because of either neglect or disinvestment or disaster and slow response and neither city, given the scale of the issue, could ever be fixed by design. The communities that live there also see the raw material and the resilience of things that are working and finding a home, productive landscapes, and emerging habitats developing. So I think we need to harness what’s already started to happen. In my experience a lot of designers are caught up in what they think the public wants, instead of actually having their ear to the ground about actually changing perceptions.

I read a lot of nature writing outside of design writing. There’s a magazine in the States called ‘Orion’, which is a beautiful collection of essays, poetry and photography about people and places. I’m really struck by the difference of what is discussed and presented there compared to 25 years ago. That’s obviously a rarefied group, because these are people who are interested with people’s relationship to places and the natural world, but what they perceive to be the natural world is anything but the untouched and pristine. More specifically, I think more projects like Südgelände Nature Park in Berlin, can occur in other places, bringing city dwellers and suburban dwellers in close proximity to these disturbed, spontaneous vegetation sites. These need to be done in a way that it’s clear there’s a design hand that’s curated the sequence or the proximity (I say proximity because at times, if it’s a tricky, gooey, toxic site, immersion might not be wise yet). So these provisional encounters with sites that are still off limits might be one way to start and frankly the other—and we’ve been having some of these conversations here in Virginia—is starting to demonstrate to officials in localities who are charged with management and maintenance, how much more resilient some of these tough plants are. It’s curious the native plants bias has swung so much that there’s often a lack of recognition that with the erratic weather we’ve been having, the extremes between drought and flood and changes in sea-level rise, their native place has moved. So that there’s a practical way that these places can be re-introduced as resilient and capable of less care than some other kinds of landscapes.

Is there an objective, universal standard for sustainable beauty or is it in the eye of the beholder?

If I think about what I should have done differently in that manifesto and that I’ve commented on more recently in my piece, ‘Beyond Sustaining Beauty’, was to put the ‘beauties’ in the plural and to get away from any sense that there’s a universal standard. The other general issue is that when I titled that manifesto, I used the term beauty as a shorthand for aesthetics, but because I did that and wasn’t explicit about the range of beauties that are possible, I think that caused some misinterpretation of my intentions. In my second piece I talk about changing conceptions of beauty, connected to things like dissonance, and dissonant beauty in surrealist art. Maria Hellström Reimer’s fantastic essay, ‘Unsettling Ecoscapes’ talks about the importance of creating challenging, uncanny and at times discordant everyday landscapes to stretch our sense of aesthetics from a normative conception of beauty to ugliness. There are other authors who also discuss the idea that ‘ugly’ is not the opposite of beauty; ‘banal’ is the opposite of both. The beautiful and ugly are related to each other.

What key findings have resulted from your recent research?

I have refined the premise of ‘Sustaining Beauty’ to think about the essence of the socio-ecological social agency of landscape—what is it about a landscape that has the ability to remake the way we think about ourselves as a socio-ecological community? A few points I’ll share:

1. The beautiful or aesthetics may be connected to appearance but they’re not exhausted by it. Because they’re connected to experience, time would be required to apprehend the beautiful and so that gets to repeat visits to a place, and living in a place as a fundamental part of understanding aesthetics and sustainability. From a one time visit, you don’t see sustainable beauty, you experience it over time.

2. Aesthetic experience requires duration and it exists in the exchange between what you see and what you know. The art critic Arthur Danto writes about this, where he says that there’s always a gap between what you see and what you feel and it’s processed by what you know. This gets back to your question about whether there’s one kind of sustainable beauty or not; your own experience is going to affect that, where you grew up, what kind of language you speak, so that’s important, to realise that the visual is actually only one part and it’s experienced over time and it’s in relationship to past experience.

3. I connected this point to Elaine Scarry’s writing on beauty but I now realise that positive psychologists are writing about it aswell; aesthetic experience draws us near to something and it makes us want to know more and to act. Jonathan Haidt, who’s written a book called The Happiness Hypothesis talks about aesthetic experience in urging us to create response. That’s fascinating because there’s the agency of a designer but there’s also what would you do do as a citizen, your creative act.

4. Aesthetic experience builds emotive intuition that combines feelings and knowledge. It's something you experience, but it’s in relation to what you know and calls into question what you know and essentially this back and forth between feelings and knowledge produces it’s own form of cognition—a new way of knowing that connects feelings and knowledge. This is where this new body of literature on theories of effect—which is pervasive in the humanities now and is starting to make it’s way into architecture and landscape architecture—is fascinating because it is interested less in sensual experience and more in the relationship between materials, bodies, emotions and action. That was a useful new area for me because it allowed me to pull away from aesthetic theory alone or phenomenology, both of which have limitations and to connect to this new area of what is sometimes called ‘social aesthetics’ or ‘theories of effects’. These are things that I learned about in response to criticisms of my essay that allowed me to develop a more nuanced argument about the potential reason and the effects of adding aesthetics to the sustainability agenda. It’s one thing for me to speculate about the action, and another thing for me to realize that a whole range of other disciplines are thinking very deeply right now about the connection between bodies, emotions, networks of bodies, and systems and changing ethical practices.