SANDY HOOK MEMORIAL
Location: Newtown, Connecticut
Program: Memorial/Landscape
Collaborators: Matthew Earnest (The Lunar Stratagem)
Client: Competition (short list)
A Space for Gathering
We designed a memorial for the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting as part of a competition for a permanent memorial near the former site of the school, in Newtown, Connecticut.
Our proposal for the Sandy Hook Memorial is organized into a series of spatial experiences designed to lead the visitor through the landscape to a place of serenity and quiet contemplation. We chose to work with the existing beauty and changing levels of the site, amplifying and enhancing the existing planting where necessary. We noticed a natural change in the ambient sound as one traveled deeper into the site - the sounds of traffic drops away, replaced with birdsong from the forest beyond; we augmented this effect in our design by sinking the Memorial into the hillside, so that the visitor is cast into a well of silence upon descending into the Memorial space.