Schools often serve as a locus of community identity. And in Newtown, the Sandy Hook School was just this type of really treasured place.
The New Haven based Svigals + Partners Architects have the challenging job of rebuilding Sandy Hook Elementary School, where 26 children and educators were murdered in December 2012.
According to a New York Times profile, the 30-person firm has some experience designing schools, but they're better known for Yale laboratories and high-end homes. Svigals + Partners have been working on the new Sandy Hook School, to be ready for 500 students to return in the Fall of 2016. (Students are now being bused to nearby towns.) The state of Connecticut has set aside $50 million in bonds to help pay for the construction.
In their "design narrative," the firm describes how they are using a community based approach, holding workshops to facilitate a "shared voice for the project." This includes design elements for the placement of the school, orientation of classrooms, and security concerns.
Svigals + Partners Sandy Hook School Project Manager Julia McFadden joined WNPR's Where We Live to talk about the process of designing a school after a tragedy, along with Dana Cuff, Director of cityLAB and architecture professor at UCLA.
Cuff said that the challenge for architects is not "hardening" after a tragedy. "When you do it well," she said, "it has that quality of both acknowledging the tragic event and at the same time... [acknowledging] the community's new ideas about how they want to think about themselves."
McFadden said that the strength of the Newtown community, and their rallying theme "We Choose Love" has guided them well. "One of the things that we've looked at with the community here," she said, "is how the new school needs to bring back that continuity that had been there. Schools often serve as a locus of community identity. They provide a place of gathering physically, but they also bring a metaphysical sense of gathering, where communal memories and aspirations reside. And in Newtown, the Sandy Hook School was just this type of really treasured place."
McFadden said Svigals didn't want their approach to the security concerns to compromise the design elements "that serves as a nurturing environment for children to learn," which she said is the primary purpose of the school. "It was a conversation that we had to have with the community... How can we make logical, rational, measurable improvements to security protocols that involves not only the physical building but our operations and technology working together."
One example of this was that Svigals created a rain garden bioswale along the front of the new school, which serves as "something beautiful and educational," McFadden said, but also as a security barrier.
Listen to more of the interview:
