Historically, memorials of the past have taken the form of figurative sculptures and monumental buildings, often integrated into a commemorative garden or plaza. They are places for reflection, with designs that use scale to conjure a feeling of importance and to cement that impression on future generations. Opening to the public on November 13, the permanent Sandy Hook, Connecticut, memorial to the 20 children and 6 educators who were murdered at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012 also achieves this goal: Its design honors the lives of the deceased and offers their families a place to grieve and remember. However, a statue in a green mall it is not.
Instead, The Clearing, as it was named by its designers Dan Affleck and Ben Waldo of global landscape, planning, and urban design firm SWA, is a work of monumental landscape. Moved by the Sandy Hook tragedy, the duo submitted to the design competition independently from their employer in 2017. At that time, Affleck, a West Hartford, Connecticut, native and painter by background, and Waldo, a California-born musician, had already worked together on several projects as landscape architects at SWA in San Francisco. With this memorial, they embraced “the chance to collaborate on something very meaningful,” Waldo says.
They began their design process looking at precedents, which mostly helped Affleck and Waldo determine what not to do for a project designed for healing. “We found that the traditional monuments—stone object in a civic space—typically are really not doing justice the complexity of trauma, of memory, of emotion, and the full spectrum of those components that live with the person after experiencing an event like this,” Waldo says. “Just marking something in stone says, ‘This happened,’ but doesn’t necessarily say much more than that.”
Chosen from 189 international submissions by the Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial Commission, a working group that included three parents of the victims, The Clearing is an approximately 3.5-acre design on a 5.3-acre site adjacent to the Sandy Hook school that incorporates two existing ponds and a woodland area into a memorial that embraces the inherent dynamism of landscape design. It is centered around a young London planetree on an island in the middle of a lightly swirling water feature with the names of the dead engraved around the perimeter of its granite basin. Using sound, color, and the site’s features, the project encourages meditation as one moves along its spiraling pathways to reach this nucleus.
