“Culture is to know the best that has 

been said and thought in the world.”

—Matthew Arnold 

The ‘Sweetness and Light’ of Ekburg Hall

Ekburg Hall remains one of my favorite places on the city-wide campus of the Savannah College of Art and Design. It serves as the headquarters of SCAD’s fashion and accessory design department. Initially, I came to SCAD to study fashion exclusively. But a couple of kind painting professors encouraged me to spend more time focused in front of blank canvasses rather than hunched over my sewing machines.

And I have never regretted my exchange in art forms. But I’m happy to report I still design clothes and fashion accessories, spending at least one day a week happily running my sewing machines — a skill taught to me by my mother back in the old USSR before I was ten years old.

Designed by Gottfried Norman in 1892, this building painted en Plein air originally served the City of Savannah as the Henry Street School. Located at 115 West Henry Street in the Victorian District of Savannah, this building was later expanded to its current size in 1910 by architect Hyman Witcover.

Like so many beautiful buildings in Savannah, this building was abandoned as a middle school by the Savannah Chatham County Public School System (SCCPSS) in 1975, only to be purchased by SCAD in 1986. It was then historically restored to its current and more fashionable educational use.

The building is named Ekburg Hall to honor Richard and Judy Ekburg, a local philanthropic power couple who contributed to many educational institutions in and around Savannah. These included SCAD, the Telfair Museum, the Mighty Eighth Airforce Museum, Bethesda Boys Academy, Savannah Technical College, and Savannah Christian Preparatory School.

As stated in some of the literature associated with this historic building, Ekburg Hall was built using a combination of ‘Romanesque’ and ‘Queen Anne’ revival architectural styles.

Architectural historian Mark Girouard used Sweetness and Light as the title to his book about the Queen Anne architectural movement, which chronicled the period between 1860 through 1900, both in England and in the United States. For Girouard, the term ‘sweetness and light’ implied that taste and beauty in architecture were not restricted to the aristocratic and wealthy but should be applied to and directly benefit all classes within society. 

Jonathan Swift wrote his exciting Gulliver’s Travels five years before James Oglethorpe founded the Georgia Colony in Savannah in 1733. He also wrote of ‘sweetness and light’ as the essence of beauty and intelligence and the two critical components of a distinctive culture.

A Victorian-age cultural critic and poet named Matthew Arnold echoed Jonathon Swift’s sentiment. To Matthew Arnold, a person of culture is like a honey bee. Just like the bee, her job is to suck the juice from surrounding beautiful flowers and make honey and wax. The honey is sweet and enjoyed by everyone. The wax is instrumental because candles are created with it to offer us light to see.

Thus, like a honey bee, a person of culture brings forth and shares ‘sweetness and light’ with the world.

I’d say that’s the essential history of SCAD’s Ekburg Hall. It began as a school serving the children of Savannah. It then was transformed and repurposed to advance the cultural art of fashion. And along the way, it was assisted by a wealthy couple entirely motivated in their profound sweetness and light found in abundance as the essence of their generous souls.