What’s Happening: Located near the school where a mass shooting killed 26 people ten years ago, a wooded memorial gives the families and the country at large a peaceful refuge to grieve and reflect.

The Download: Memorials tend to follow formulas: figurative statues or monumental buildings commemorating a sole historical figure or casualties of war, disease, and disasters. But how does one design a memorial for tragedies that are ongoing, such as mass shootings, a scourge that continues to claim the lives of 40,000 Americans every year? Some memorials to specific incidents (Las Vegas, Pulse) are underway but not yet finished—a testimony to the frequency of gun violence events, the fraught political approval process, and the complexities that designers must address to create thoughtful places of reflection.

The Clearing, a newly opened memorial to the 20 students and 6 educators who died at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT, on Dec. 14, 2012, may have an answer. Instead of going down a traditional route, Dan Affleck and Ben Waldo of Bay Area landscape and urban design firm SWA opted for a tranquil outdoor reprieve within a wooded area a quarter-mile from the school. As visitors enter the five-acre site through three curving terraces lined with indigenous dogwood and maple trees, they descend on a single London planetree planted on an island in a water feature. Names of the 26 deceased are engraved on the perimeter of its granite basin.

Affleck and Waldo’s proposal was chosen from 189 submissions by the Sandy Hook Permanent Memorial Commission, a group that included three parents of the victims. The duo envisioned a memorial that respects grieving loved ones—Newtown locals mark anniversaries of the shooting with quiet reflection rather than planned ceremonies. At the Clearing, nature does all the talking. Local landscape firm Artemis selected flowers to attract pollinators like butterflies and native birds, who gleefully chirp in warmer months. Gravel crunches underfoot; frogs croak in the woods. As the paths give way to a stone-paved ring around the fountain, its gently whirling water hushes nature’s cacophony, giving visitors clarity to contemplate the tragedy and its ongoing reverberations.

In the United States, mass shootings continue to become more and more commonplace. This year alone, a teenager opened fire at an elementary school in Uvalde, TX, fatally shooting 19 students and two teachers. A racially motivated mass shooting caused the deaths of ten Black people at a Buffalo supermarket; a similar incident targeted Asian church-goers in California. While each new tragedy revives discussions about gun control, political entanglements often stymie progress. (Though President Biden did sign the first major gun safety legislation in 30 years this past summer.) Meanwhile, family, friends, and communities are left to grieve their losses and, in Newtown’s case, stand up to malicious conspiracy theories insisting the shooting never happened at all.

The reverberations of gun violence—especially when children are targeted in hallways and classrooms—can devastate communities for years, yet the loss of life is now so routine that many incidents go unreported, and victims’ stories untold. The Clearing will ensure the tragic events of Newtown are not soon forgotten: “Time will smudge this orderly arrangement, just as it slowly alters the texture of grief,” Justin Davidson writes for Curbed. “The young plane tree at the center of the fountain will reach up and spread out, something that day’s victims never had a chance to do.”

In Their Own Words: “We felt that landscape as a medium was something that would express and evoke honor for the reality of [grief] much better than an object would,” Waldo told AD. “I have no sense of how frequently any given person in this community intends to use this space, but we hope it’ll be a respite. The topography and the site lends itself to that. It’s a place where you can just be with your feelings and your memories.”

Surface Says: The memorial’s intimate scale and tranquil setting in nature wield a certain healing power, offering a soothing meditation on life’s rarefied beauty—even if those moments of clarity are fleeting.

Have a news story our readers need to see? Submit it here.

Reach the design world every morning. Find out more about advertising in the Design Dispatch.

The ongoing makeover of LaGuardia Airport—an $8 billion revamp of its passenger infrastructure that involved teaming with the Queens Museum and Public Art Fund to mount large-scale art installations by the likes of Rashid Johnson, Jeppe Hein, and Aliza Nisenbaum—has been hailed as a triumph by locals who long considered it the armpit of New York’s three airports. Next up in the spotlight is Newark Liberty International Airport, whose just-completed Terminal A makeover by Tutor Perini/Parisons involved commissioning two permanent large-scale artworks by Layqa Nuna Yawar and Karyn Olivier that reflect New Jersey’s oft-overlooked history.

Stretching across 350 feet of the arrivals hall and concourse level is Nuna Yawar’s celebratory mural, which the Ecuadorian-born, Rutgers-trained painter adorned with vivid depictions of obscure figures with New Jersey connections—the photographer Dorothea Lange, transgender rights activist Marsha P. Johnson, and jazz singer Sarah Vaughan. Cascading through 52 feet of the three-level terminal, meanwhile, is Olivier’s largest installation to date, featuring stacks of 17 floating and parallel metal rings emblazoned with panoramic photographs the Trinidadian artist took of New Jersey’s most recognizable sites. The rings compress and expand with the viewer’s position, revealing a rich topographical mosaic that echoes the disorientation of traversing time zones.

“New Jersey has always had an identity crisis—we’ve always stood in the shadow of New York,” Kevin O’Toole, the chairman of the Port Authority, which commissioned the artworks with Public Art Fund, told the New York Times. As the terminal prepares to reopen, however, “New Jersey can tell its own story about its rich history and its people. It’s a land of immigrants that have made this state so wealthy in terms of its culture.”

Known for dreaming up lively and surrealist interiors and set design in her adopted hometown of Los Angeles, Adi Goodrich now returns to her roots of whimsical woodworking by debuting Sing-Thing, her first-ever line of furniture. Described as a “wet Sophie Taeuber Arp painting that’s fallen on top of a Charlotte Perriand table,” the collection gleefully eschews the trappings of fast furniture and honors “frunchrooms,” a south-side Chicago word defined as the front room in someone’s home that houses all the family’s most treasured moments.

Theory hosted an intimate dinner at Nine Orchard’s East Room to launch the brand’s Holiday 2022 collection and kick off the season. The evening was co-hosted by entrepreneur and stylist Beverly Nguyen, founder of Lower East Side homewares boutique Beverly’s NYC, who creative directed the dinner’s florals, menu, and decor all inspired by Theory’s New York attitude alongside Lucinda Constable of The Table.

When was it? Nov. 9

Where was it? Nine Orchard, New York

Who was there? Camille Becerra, Ian Bradley, Anna Polonsky, Woldy Reyes, Minjae Kim, Flynn McGarry, Alex Tieghi-Walker, Naomi Otis, Janko Tadic, Eva Alt, Yan Yan Chan, and more.

When: Nov. 16–Dec. 20

Where: Morton Fine Art, Washington, D.C.

What: Brightly shaded walls and windows, collaged book spines, and iconographic depictions of Australian fauna and flora make up much of Hattam’s painterly practice, a lifelong investigation of the domestic interior. Here, she reflects on psychic space at the hands of the pandemic’s seeping isolation through vivid jigsaw woodcut printing, a technique of Classical Japanese art that was later adopted by Edvard Munch and Paul Gauguin. Inserted regularly throughout the works are motifs of Hokusai’s Great Wave Off Kanagawa, representing a mentality of time—waves of feminism, waves of coronavirus—that embraces natural rhythms based on a sense of tidal flow.

In some corners of the design world, collaboration fatigue has, understandably, set in. One kind of creative partnership that reliably drums up excitement among even the most jaded aesthetes is also one of the least predictable: artist-designers and fragrance houses. According to beauty expert and Smell Ya Later fragrance podcast co-host Tynan Sinks, one of the earliest examples of crossover between the fragrance and art worlds occurred in 1908, when avant-garde artist Kazimir Malevich was commissioned to design a Severny Cologne bottle before shaping the future of abstract art with his bright, cubist paintings. The semi-opaque glass bottle he created features a polar bear perched atop an ice block as its stopper, with the remainder rendered as an ocean-worn block of ice.

Founded in 1966, Gufram produces some of the world’s most recognizable radical design staples. Under Charley Vezza’s creative direction, the brand has revitalized its catalog through collaborations with famous designers and brands to keep the radical spirit alive.

Surface Says: Packed with playful irreverence, furniture from Gufram adds a pop to any interior. The brand’s most recognizable pieces, such as the Cactus coat stand and Pratone lounge chair, prove that humor never goes out of style.

Would you have a slice of this sprawling, 1,200-pound pink cherry cake?

Kim Kardashian dresses to match a luminously pink James Turrell work.

Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield come together for a cannabis collab.

Mastodon’s poor UX means it likely won’t outpace Twitter anytime soon.