On December 16, 2012, two days after a gunman murdered 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, President Barack Obama offered words of comfort to families and members of the community at an interfaith vigil. “There’s only one thing we can be sure of, and that is the love that we have—for our children, for our families, for each other.” An excerpt of his message that day will be inscribed on a stone wall in the entrance pavilion to a permanent memorial designed by the landscape architects SWA Group. The Clearing, as the plan is called, was selected last month after an almost year-long competition.

Conceived as a series of concentric circles, SWA’s design will draw visitors into the five-acre site near the new school, guiding them from a small parking lot (accessible via a gated entrance drive) to an open-air pavilion where they can prepare to meander through the memorial. “The path has no true beginning or end, allowing visitors to experience the space at their own pace and in their own way,” wrote the designers in their proposal to the Permanent Memorial Commission. “We wanted to acknowledge that the healing process does not end, but continues and grows . . . We felt a path would both represent and nurture this process.”