Big. Bold. Brazen. The Savannah New Media Center is envisioned as an iconic monument to a new way of thinking about media, culture, and the city of Savannah. Drawing inspiration from the citys built heritage, the SNMC strikes a new discourse about what civic culture means in the 21st Century by celebrating the contrasts and dichotomies inherent to a new neighborhood in an old city. Striking a line between public and private space, between inside and outside, light and dark, natural and built, high-brow and low, digital and analog, the SNMC seeks to modulate the divide; to celebrate the dialogue of the in between.

The foundational divide is between light and dark space. Analog media delights in northlight and expansive spaces, but live performance and digital media demand greater environmental control. Light spaces are kept transparent at the north side of the building, while dark spaces are kept opaque toward the south, providing optimal lighting conditions while mitigating solar heat gain. The division between light and dark spaces organized around a vertical circulation and service core establishes the parti from which the built form begins to emerge, guided by the principles of order and proportion and informed by a traditional, local understanding of modulated mass and plane at once both rational and expressive.