The first option had few fans: The old building was not energy-efficient, on top of which it would always be an architectural symbol too painful for many residents to confront. (Later the architects would convene a large separate task force to help guide its design.) The community group settled on three possible plans: repair and reopen the existing campus, a red-brick, vaguely modernist design, wrapped around a grass courtyard, from 1956 build a new school on the same site or find another location in town. Newtown arranged a series of community meetings to tackle the question of how and where to rebuild. It has also designed houses for clients including Garry Trudeau, the cartoonist and a classmate of Barry Svigals, the firm’s founder, in the Yale College class of 1971. The firm has a number of public schools and college buildings on its résumé. Svigals + Partners won the job of designing the new elementary school, with room for 500 students in preschool through the fourth grade, less than a year after the killings, in the fall of 2013. Still, there are hints in the Svigals + Partners approach - especially in the way it deals with the school’s site, carved from a wooded wetland - of what a more searching, powerful design might have looked like.Īfter the shooting, Newtown, a city of 27,000 founded in 1705 and located in Connecticut’s Fairfield County, about 70 miles northeast of Manhattan, sent Sandy Hook students to a school in nearby Monroe. The architects had to fight to protect some of their more ambitious design features from the sort of cost-cutting that is all too typical in public-school construction. Working with a $50-million budget, slightly larger than is typical for a campus of this size, what Svigals + Partners have produced is a largely straightforward piece of architecture dressed in bright color and a mixture of cheerful and cloying vernacular touches. The new school doesn’t bridge that admittedly huge gap. It would have taken an extraordinary architectural achievement to meet the immediate needs of the incoming Sandy Hook students while also grappling in a meaningful way with the larger significance of what happened there. The violence was out of all proportion to the setting. As is the case with many recent mass shootings, whether driven by ideology, mental illness or some other impulse, it took place against the soft-target backdrop of generic, forgettable architecture. Sandy Hook was terror of a different kind.
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