Michael Van Valkenburgh says he does not rely on memorials to deal with his grief. But he found solace in choosing the design for the World Trade Center (WTC) memorial. Van Valkenburgh, the Charles Eliot Professor in Practice of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), was one of 13 jurors to select the design that will eventually commemorate those who died on Sept. 11, 2001.

Once a Cambridge resident, Van Valkenburgh’s home in New York is not far from the former site of the World Trade Center. “The year after 9/11, reading the obituaries of the victims [in The New York Times]…it was a healing sort of memorial experience for me,” says Van Valkenburgh. “So I looked at this as an opportunity to offer me that. And it was, it did.”

Selecting the WTC memorial took six months and involved three rounds, in which the initial pool of 5,201 open competition entries was pared down to eight, then to three finalists, before the winning design, “Reflecting Absence,” was chosen. The jurors came from a variety of backgrounds, including art and politics. One juror, Paula Grant Berry ’79, is the widow of a victim of the collapse of the south tower.

“It was exceedingly like solace and mourning are,” Van Valkenburgh says. “It was very painful at times, especially in the beginning of the jury process when we had many very long meetings with family members who had lost people they love in the building.”

Van Valkenburgh describes how the background of each juror contributed to the understanding of the other 12. “Those of us that are designers or architects or landscape architects sort of talked to the people about what design was, how it worked, and what drawings were because nine of the 13 jurors were not artists or designers,” he says.

James Young, an expert on memorials from the University of Massachusetts, talked to his fellow jurors about the significance of memorials in general and especially one to which the public is paying so much attention.

“One of the things James Young was always reminding us of is that every memorial becomes a historic memorial after the generation that it was made for is deceased, and so you have to say to yourself ‘What are we doing with four acres of open space in Lower Manhattan?’” Van Valkenburgh says.

The site’s location and its importance to the collective memory of Americans underscores the competition’s magnitude. For a submission to get to subsequent rounds, Van Valkenburgh says the necessary element was often somewhat fleeting, some characteristic of the design about which the jurors may have just had a hunch.

“In these one board submittals, you are looking for a glimmer of magic...it’s like having a crush on somebody who is so far away you can’t see them,” he says.

Van Valkenburgh’s rise to the top of the field of landscape architecture—and his role in making the far-reaching decision for the WTC memorial competition—is tied closely to his relationship with Harvard.

Educated at Cornell University and the University of Illlinois, Van Valkenburgh has been at the GSD for more than 20 years. After graduate school, he began teaching at the Radcliffe Seminars in Landscape Architecture. By 1988, he was a tenured professor at the GSD and eventually became the chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture.

During the same period, his Cambridge office became distinguished for its professional work. A 1988 project in the Radcliffe Quadrangle, a series of mesh screens that became “ice walls” when the temperature dropped below freezing, was a result of innovative research Van Valkenburgh conducted to understand ice as a potential medium in landscape architecture. The ice walls were exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art’s “Light Architecture” exhibition in 1996.

The subtlety of this project is characteristic of a larger tendency in Van Valkenburgh’s work, often extraordinary in its light touch. He has received acclaim for Mill Race Park, a project he did in Columbus, Indiana, which reclaimed a former industrial site in order to provide a public gathering space. The gradual slopes, which recall landforms native to the Midwest, make this enormous project seem perfectly natural.

This quality of Van Valkenburgh’s work is also apparent at the center of campus, as he has directed the restoration of Harvard Yard over the past decade. Many of the original trees were ravaged by Dutch elm disease, so Van Valkenburgh has guided the careful replanting and replanning of this space. In addition to adding more resilient trees, his firm has modernized the system of paths and removed vegetation inappropriately planted at the base of many buildings.

Van Valkenburgh received an honor award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation for this restoration, which blends into the existing landscape and represents the antithesis of the sort of project that trumpets the artist’s own ego.