Is Baltimore on the verge of a manufacturing renaissance?

At a time when the nation debates its future around steel, coal and Harley Davidson motorcycles, it isn't surprising to see that the Baltimore SUN explores the city's options for a manufacturing renaissance. Not steel, coal or automobiles are the topics, though, but maker spaces, wood-work, routers, and recycled traffic signs.

Making in Baltimore: Open Works Exhibit 2017 (Photo: Philipsen)

Heading on the Gowanus Expressway in New York towards the Verrazano Bridge, one gets an upper story view of Brooklyn's industrial waterfront, one of the nation's petri dishes of post industrial reinvention. Many of the stately multistory industrial buildings, pressing hard against the edge of the elevated expressway, are no longer vacant. A particular handsome and stately collection of buildings advertises its new content with a long line of banners. Makerspace is one of the new uses. Co-location of multi-use innovation hubs, Forbes calls this, specifically the re-birth of Brooklyn's 1906 Bush Terminal as "Industry City". The once largest multi-tenant industrial property in the United States was a trailblazer 112 years ago. Can it be a trailblazer once again, this time for integrated industries of a new age of making in the US?

Industry City, Brooklyn (Photo: Philipsen)

In Baltimore the scale of the same idea is naturally smaller, but the dream is the same. Baltimore's most famous maker space sits in City Garage and is dubbed Foundery Place as part of Kevin Plank's reclamation of a Baltimore former municipal bus garage on the waterfront and his own corporate foray into local production. But what caught the SUN's attention is a maker space in a much less illustrious location on Greenmount Avenue, an endeavor, funded and supported by the non-profit Deutsch Foundation and conceived as part of the Station North art eco system.

Whether in Brooklyn, at Sagamore or in Greenmount West, the idea is once again to integrate industries to realize synergies. A hub for learning, making and technology that can reignite making in new ways. But this time, the motor is art and the goal isn't foreign trade but local production and consumption through workforce development, job training, re-entry and job creation for those left behind in the shift from industrial production to knowledge, service and research.

Open Works Executive Director Will Holman, an architect by training, has studied maker spaces around the world, their history and presence and their potential in an age of accelerated innovation before his space even opened two years ago. I have reported about his dream baby several times in this space. (here, and here).

Open Works is a 34,000 SF non-profit that provides "access to tools and technology and knowledge" said Will Holman, General Manager in a presentation about the project the evening before the ribbon cutting. Open Works is a project of The Baltimore Arts Realty Corporation (BARCO), a non-profit real estate development corporation focused on neighborhood revitalization and economic development in Baltimore City. (Article of Sept 20, 2016)

As the SUN reports, the concepts of training and providing expensive tools for those who need them to produce their ideas on a lease basis has now been expanded into contract work.

The cavernous lower floor of the Open Works Maker facility
(Photo: Philipsen)

The new workshop will allow the center to expand the commercial work it’s been doing for about a year, rather than working around members and equipment reservations. It features a full wood shop with an industrial-scale CNC router that can quickly turn out furniture, signs and other items. (SUN)

During the last holiday season Open Works makers produced articles from recycled MTA bus stop signs and CNC routed wood product were a hit when they were sold in a pop-up shop at the corner of Charles and North Avenue. The articles were quirky and authentically Baltimore. The pop-up space is now supposed to run all year long. Open Work's Production, meanwhile, is moving to the next level with an order from the furniture chain store Room and Board.

In a city that has shed 92.3% of its industrial jobs between 1996 and 2016, craft production like the one in Open Works is just a drop in the bucket. Still, maker spaces are small scale experiments of a new concept of making. Can production of the future can happen in small, shared facilities or even your own basement or garage thanks to new tools and technologies such as 3-D printers? Instead of in the huge and capital intensive corporate production facilities of the past? Can it be highly customized, made in small batches instead of the assembly line which required economy of scale? And, most importantly, can it be local, close to the consumer instead of in China or other far away cheap labor places?

Cutting wood with a CNC router at Open Works
(Photo: Philipsen)

If the answer is yes to some of these questions, it is because of technology and not because of federal trade wars. And the winners won't be coal, steel and automobiles, but new products, many of which we haven't even thought of. It is good that Baltimore with its rich tradition of making is part of experimenting and dreaming.

Klaus Philipsen, FAIA