Included with GeorgiaRoam+SCAD's Adaptive Reuse: A Jail, a Mill & a Carriage Factory
The deep-cut SCAD tour — historic Savannah buildings the art school rescued and reinvented
Self-guided driving tour in Savannah · 4.1 mi · driving · ~1h 26m · 7 stops
The Tour
The deep-cut SCAD tour — historic Savannah buildings the art school rescued and reinvented. A self-guided Georgia Roam tour of SCAD in Savannah.
SCAD's Adaptive Reuse: A Jail, a Mill & a Carriage Factory is a self-guided driving tour of Savannah, built around its campus side. It's one of 20 Georgia Roam tours in Savannah — each a different route through the city, on your own schedule.
The walk covers 7 stops over about 4.1 miles and roughly 1 hour 26 min, entirely at your own pace. Each stop's story unlocks on your phone the moment you arrive — GPS-triggered, hands-free, no guide and no tour group to keep up with.
What you'll see
SCAD's classrooms hide in buildings with surprising former lives, and this driving tour seeks out the most unusual ones. You'll see an 1887 county jail topped with a Moorish onion dome, a Mediterranean-style hospital built for merchant sailors, and brick schoolhouses from the 1890s and 1920s. There's also a riverfront flour mill that now holds painting and photography studios, and a former carriage factory turned technology center.
The common thread is adaptive reuse: keeping a historic building standing by giving it a new purpose. At each stop you can read the building's first life in its details, such as arched school entrances, terra-cotta trim, heavy timber beams and the tight window pattern of an old jail. Then think about what had to change inside to fit studios, labs and lecture halls.
The stops are spread across downtown and the neighborhoods just beyond, areas many visitors never reach, so this one works best by car or bike. It suits architecture fans, preservation students and repeat visitors who've already done the squares. The Georgia Roam app tells each building's story when you arrive.
Georgia
