How the architects of the new Sandy Hook Elementary School addressed the town’s past, and its future Preparing to replace a painful past. (Reuters/Michelle McLoughlin) SHARE WRITTEN BY Jeanne Kim @jeannesjkim November 29, 2014 For residents of Newtown, Connecticut, the small town devastated by a deadly school shooting nearly two years ago, replacing Sandy Hook Elementary School was going to require more than a tear-down and a simple redesign. Working with the theme “ We Choose Love ,” the architecture firm Svigals + Partners met with 50 parents , school employees, and townspeople to design a new school that not only would be outfitted with tighter security measures but would be restorative to the town—to feel not like a fortress but a place of education and communal gathering. (Architects who rebuilt the library at Columbine High School in Colorado, the site of a 1999 school shooting, similarly found that for locals, the rebuilding process was a therapeutic part of relieving