ATLANTA — The Savannah College of Art and Design’s Atlanta campus is relying on some beauty as a way to highlight its brains.
When the college, best known as SCAD, established its Atlanta presence in 2005 and merged with a struggling, local art school, it built its traditional programs in art and fashion. It quickly expanded the reputation of its Savannah campus in the area of animation that’s integral to Atlanta’s booming game-development industry. And it recently began offering a film major in Atlanta to compliment the city’s exploding motion-picture business.
Now, it’s working to gain a regional reputation in writing, a field more associated with four-year universities like Emory and Oglethorpe. And that’s where it’s playing its trump card by using the beauty of its 130-year-old mansion, Ivy Hall.
“This is totally SCAD,” said Georgia Lee, Ivy Hall’s director.
Built on the city’s highest hill, the house was a railroad executive’s wedding present to his son. Family members lived there until 1970 when it was modified to become The Mansion, an upscale restaurant. A fire in 2000 closed the eatery, leaving it as a home for vagrants until 2004 when SCAD bought it away from a developer intent on razing it for a condo site.
The school’s Savannah-based restoration students made a giant class project out of bringing it back to life. And the art and interior-design students added the avant garde flair when it opened in 2008 as SCAD’s writing center.
“So many old houses have turned into museums,” Lee said.
To put that beauty to work, Lee is hosting 19 events over the next two weeks, and she’s working on next year’s calendar, too. In addition to showcasing the restoration, the events are to put the writing center on the region’s map.
Lee, a former bureau chief for Women’s Wear Daily, taps her New York contacts of publishers and agents to bring noted authors for book signings and lectures as writers in residence who get to stay upstairs in the mansion.
Thursday, she met with officials from the Atlanta Press Club about jointly hosting programs for journalists.
“It seems like there’s a lot of demand for a good writing course. They may be on the right track if they keep at it,” said Doug Robinson, owner of Eagle Eye Bookshop in Decatur. “They have a good name and a lot of credibility in the area.”
But the writing center doesn’t just dwell on literature and creative writing. Saturday, SCAD is hosting a “digital boot camp” with instruction on writing for websites and social media.
Such up-to-date, pragmatic lessons are the main focus of SCAD. All of the writing students must take classes in design, photography and other practical applications of pairing the written word with the digital.
Although SCAD’s Atlanta writing program is only in its fourth year, all 59 of last year’s graduates wound up with jobs, according to administrators.
“Companies are begging for people that know how to put together a CD or a website or a press release,” Lee said.
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