Sandy Hook Memorial Opens Ahead of Shooting’s 10th Anniversary

Abstract

The two met for coffee and spent hours talking over concepts before putting pen to paper and sketching out their proposal and sending it off to the Sandy Hook Memorial Commission. A half decade after they entered the competition and just over a decade after the terrible event, "The Clearing," the $3.7-million memorial created by the two designers and their firm, SWA, opened quietly to the public earlier this month-just ahead of the shooting's 10th anniversary on Dec. 14.The memorial's debut was culmination of five years of intensive planning, design and ultimately construction that required scrupulous attention to detail and a focus on precision. A "Circling network of paths" winds its way "Through a woodland" and "Across ponds and meadows," SWA notes in a press release on the memorial's opening. At the same time, Affleck and Waldo were studying other similar memorials as well, including the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C., and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. The final design drew its inspiration from both other modern monuments to terrible tragedies, such as the 9/11 Memorial, as well as the meditative qualities of the New England landscape. Stone pathways are meant to be evocative of Connecticut and New England, while the design also takes advantage of the mature maples that were already on the site and which provide a "Sense of envelopment and enclosure in nature," notes SWA's description of the memorial. The Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial Commission wound up choosing "The Clearing" out of 189 submissions from around the world.