With a new academic year well underway, it’s time to take to the skies and see how the Savannah College of Art and Design’s rapidly expanding Atlanta campus has transformed a former low-rise motel and other underused property in Midtown’s northernmost blocks.

Just south of where Spring Street meets the Buford-Spring Connector, SCAD continues to build the third of three student towers expected to add almost 1,600 beds to Midtown’s swelling stock of highly amenitized student housing.

The most recent two-building project, collectively called SCAD Forty Four, was modified from earlier designs that had called for a single, taller tower standing 20 stories.

Now, the first 10-story phase—the northernmost, gray-painted building—opened in August with 581 student beds, a dining hall, and a parking garage. 

That’ll be followed by the rest in slightly taller phase two—402 beds, a theater, classrooms, and a fitness center—in August 2023. Total square footage will land at 384,000, a SCAD spokesperson told Urbanize Atlanta last year.

SCAD Forty Four's first phase (shown in dark gray, at right) opened last month with nearly 600 new student beds.

SCAD had initially planned a more consolidated approach for its next wave of student housing, with 1,000 beds in a single dorm complex with other components; those plans were nixed so that part of the housing could deliver in time for fall 2022 semester, per a school spokesperson.

The costs for future creatives to dorm at SCAD Forty Four start at $10,586 for this academic year, which gets a bed in a quad suite with three roommates and a full kitchen.

A private studio with a kitchenette, meanwhile, will set a student (or their parents) back $12,185 for this school year.

Next door, SCAD delivered a sleek, 14-story student residential building (SCAD Forty, named for the school’s 40th anniversary) topped by an event space in 2019. It stands across the Connector from Atlantic Station, offering nearly 600 new beds.

Elsewhere, SCAD bought two nearby properties in 2020, including the John Marshall Law School Building on West Peachtree Street, in hopes of eventually creating a presence in north Midtown on par with Georgia Tech’s in the center of Midtown and Georgia State University's downtown.

In the gallery above, have a sky-high look at where SCAD’s expansion stands today—and how it’s all planned to fit together come next school year.

• Recent Midtown news, discussion (Urbanize Atlanta)