If design is not as dead as Philip Starck once said it was and lives again through 3D printing, if there truly is a revolutionary, democratized, sustainable, distributed future of manufacturing awaiting a few years down the line, then that future begins right now: at Brooklyn’s Navy Yard Industrial Park’s newest building, being built as we speak: the (New) NewLab.
Although the 84,000 square-foot new facilities at Building 128 are under construction, the start-ups that make up the core of NewLab are already hard at work in their space on the 8th floor of building 280, in the Navy Yard, which once was used for building state of the art ships and today is rapidly becoming the coolest industrial park ever conceived.
The NewLab project embodies the magic of 3D printing: making boring manufacturing into an infinite source of inspiration and enthusiasm and revival as we begin to discover the infinite possibilities that lie ahead.
It is being carried out with the support of some of the most rapidly evolving companies in the world of 3D creativity, including Ultimaker, EOS, 3D Systems and Autodesk to jointly cover the open-source, professional/industrial, consumer 3D printing technology and 3D software segments. EOS contributed by donating one of its Formiga P110 plastic laser sintering systems for all the NewLab’s tenants to use for rapid prototyping and on-demand component manufacturing activities. Autodesk, which is mostly interested in developing its Spark open source creative ecosystem, made its professional software available for all the start ups to use and experiment with.
Managed by David Belt, a real estate developer who is also the founder and managing principal of Macro Sea (a real estate development firm that seeks to create value in underutilized places), the NewLab’s goal is a full revival of New York city’s manufacturing capabilities and it has chosen Brooklyn’s Dumbo, New York’s most rapidly developing area, as its base.
When I used to live in New York, a little over ten years ago, and I somehow happened to end up on the wrong side of the Brooklyn Bridge, I remember closing the car windows and rushing to get away. Now there are cool bars, cafes, clubs, shops and some of the most sought after pizzerias, with 100 yard lines forming outside on Saturday nights.
This is the area where the NewLab is going to escalate its mission to disrupt global manufacturing through the work of its tenants, including some of the most fascinating start-ups in the entire global scenario, most of which are directly (and all of which are indirectly) linked with 3D printing.
I stopped by the Navy Yard because 3D Hubs’s co-founder Bram de Zwart told me about it and I wanted to see the future facilities for myself. 3D Hubs is one of the start-ups in the New Lab, certainly one that the 3D printing community is already familiar with and arguably one of the most successful, having already established a role as the largest and fastest growing 3D printer network in the world.
Within Lab, another company in the NewLab, is also very much focused on 3D printing. It is a design and consultancy firm that uses additive manufacturing through a powerful optimization engine which takes as its inputs, parameters such as desired weight requirements, maximum displacement and stiffness. Within’s technology is currently being implemented in the aerospace and in the medical sector: its CEO, Dr. Siavish Mahdavi is also the co-founder of Digital Forming (another very interesting 3D printing related company).
Other tenants include DNI, an industrial design and consultancy firm focusing on digital manufacturing of functional and unique motorcycle parts and Terreform ONE [Open Network Ecology], a non profit experimental design group that promotes new concepts for the advancement of cities. Some of the studios and designers in the NewLab focus on using rapid prototyping and CAD software for product design and the development of responsive and smart objects and furniture. This is the case for Jason Krugman, Eric Forman and RockPaperRobot. Others, such as The Living, create functioning prototypes of what they envision as the architecture of the future.
Some of the start-ups own members, such as Aria Aiolova, Founding Co-President of Terreform ONE, and Siavish Mahdavi, are also playing an active role as advisors in the project’s development, leveraging on their own expertise. Because the NewLab is a project that already combines all direct approaches to new manufacturing in order to make it real. And if they can make it in Brooklyin, perhaps they will, one day, make it anywhere.
