By Margaret Rhodes

WHEN THE 2016 school year starts, students and faculty will return to Sandy Hook Elementary School for the first time since a gunman killed 20 students and six adults. They will return to a new building and landscape thoughtfully, but subtly, outfitted with security measures designed by local architecture firm Svigals + Partners.

The town of Newtown, Connecticut demolished the former building last fall, nearly a year after the shooting. It’s hard to imagine teachers, students, or parents would have wanted to return to a place filled with horrifying memories, like the parking lot where police gathered terrified children and faculty after evacuating them from the school on the morning of December 14, 2012. Yet the school had some features the Sandy Hook community loved, and has missed since the school closed.

“They really loved their courtyard,” says Jay Brotman, principal at Svigals + Partners and lead architect on the $50 million redesign. It’s become his job to know what the community misses, and what it can’t bear to see again, as Svigals designed the new campus. To do that, he and his team immersed themselves in the community, perhaps more so than architects typically would, and held six workshops with 50 parents, neighbors, teachers and other school officials over the course of a few months before breaking ground in October. "I’ve been a superintendent for 15 years and an administrator for 25 years, been involved in numerous building projects, and I’ve never been more impressed with anyone than Svigals and their approach and their willingness to make adjustments from community stakeholders," says Dr. Joseph Erardi, superintendent of the Newtown Public School District. The firm's ability to consider the thoughts and needs of everyone in the community—notably, the parents who lost children in the shooting—has been paramount to the redesign, Eradi said.

Read the full article here in Wired.