Savannah N Scruggs · Design Professional · Portfolio
I design for the way people actually live in a building once the drawings are finished and the contractors have gone home.
My work moves between scales — a refuge that has to feel like refuge, a city block that has to make room for its neighbors, a single family’s living room, a carport at the edge of a yard — but the question underneath each one is the same. What does it take for a space to stop being a building and start being a place someone dwells in? Light, threshold, sequence, material; the small choices that decide whether a room receives you. This portfolio is how I work that question.
What follows is the evidence — drawings, models, iterations, the marginal notes and second guesses — of a designer learning to think a building all the way through to the way it is inhabited.
A purely public city block — gallery, makerspace, market, offices, rooftop — carved by voids, carried through a live RFP to a finalist presentation before the site's actual architects.
Services at the core, rooms at the perimeter — so the first window a resident finds opens onto trees and weather, not onto a corridor.
A mixed-use block kept porous — an amphitheater you can fall into on the way past, a marketplace stair that turns into Friday-night seating, a tube of light that opens as you climb toward the apartments.
Three rooms for one named family — primary suite, kitchen, living–dining commons — resolved across four client meetings and carried through the city's permitting.
The only project in this portfolio that exists. Every drawing tested against lumber, concrete, and the framer's questions — the closing argument.
Each project began as a question I could draw. The case studies keep the questions visible — the gradient study that organized a refuge, the massing that learned what to give away, the drawing set a built carport corrected.
Read the case studies
A drawing is a promise made to a person who is not in the room — the framer, the reviewer, the family carrying groceries in the rain.
From The drawing that becomes lumber