The most expensive machine inside UI Labs’ soon-to-open digital manufacturing institute on Goose Island will be able to cut metals into almost any shape imaginable.
The multiaxis machine, named for its ability to rotate as it cuts, will be positioned inside the hub’s 22,400-square-foot manufacturing floor like a shrine — viewable to the public through glass.
“My goal is to have every machine in that shop running all day long, every day,” said Dan Hartman, on loan from Rolls-Royce and charged with designing and running the manufacturing floor. “There will be no papers lying around the shop. It will be all digital. It will not be a typical, dirty, old factory.”
About two months ahead of opening, UI Labs’ executive director Caralynn Nowinski gave the Tribune a first look inside the $16.5 million former factory being transformed into a research and development center.
City and state tax dollars are covering construction costs. The research taking place inside will be federally funded through two Defense Department grants totaling $80 million.
Corporate partners, including Rolls-Royce, General Electric and Procter & Gamble, also are contributing. More than $3 million of equipment has been donated, Nowinski said over loud hammering and beeping of moving work platforms.
At a total of 94,000 square feet, the facility is about as large as the tech hub 1871 at the Merchandise Mart. But with 24- to 27-foot-tall ceilings and few walls, the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute feels much larger and could expand by the end of the year.
Nearly 30,000 square feet of space inside the former Republic Windows and Doors facility is being left undeveloped, leaving room for a new manufacturing innovation hub. While the institute is focused on research and development, the hub will focus on commercializing manufacturing innovations.
In short, it will cover the business end of the equation when starting a manufacturing company just as 1871 provides such services to technology entrepreneurs.
A spokeswoman for World Business Chicago said ground will be broken on the $4 million to $5 million hub by the end of the year and that the Goose Island facility was one of several sites in the area under consideration. The rest of the former window factory is leased out, with men’s clothing retailer Trunk Club most recently moving in.
“It is fair to assume that public sector investment will be pursued; however, public sector dollars will not cover the entire project,” World Business Chicago’s website states. “We are in ongoing discussions with all levels of government.”
The building is owned by candy giant Mars, which acquired Wrigley in 2008. Wrigley’s global innovation center is across the street.
With the growing use of 3-D printing — an often cube-shaped device that makes things by applying layer after layer of plastic on top of one another under computer control — the worlds of manufacturing and technology are merging and getting cheaper.
Because of the proprietary research occurring at the institute and potential military applications for it, much of the building will be off-limits to the public. During Tuesday’s tour, two workers were using a level to site the ID card readers and turnstiles leading to the lab’s working spaces.
“Security is a big piece of everything we’re doing,” Nowinski said. “It will be industrial-strength secure, both from a data perspective as well as on the personnel side.”
She showed the shell of a windowless conference room, already flanked by a key-card reader with a functioning red light, for private meetings involving sensitive technology.
Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the building features wide, light-filled work spaces; office and meeting bays; a state-of-the-art, tiered classroom; a public town hall space; a kitchen and more. It also will include the equivalent of a “clean room” for ultraprecise measurements.
Dozens of flat-screen monitors have not yet been mounted and the wiring is not yet complete, but the furniture has arrived. The areas with carpet have carpet. The refrigerators are standing by. Nowinski estimated 50 people will work out of the site on opening day.
The institute is part of an Obama Administration initiative to make the United States more competitive in manufacturing, which has lost its place as a driver of reliable, middle class jobs. The first of these institutes, a pilot program focused on 3-D printing, opened in Youngstown, Ohio, in 2012.
Detroit’s institute, focused on lightweight metals and announced at the same time as Chicago’s, opened in January.
Chicago was in competition for the original $70 million grant — $10 million more was later awarded — among a host of other cities, including Boston and Huntsville, Ala. Key to the win was a City Hall-led fundraising effort, coordinated by Deputy Mayor Steve Koch and World Business Chicago Vice Chairman Michael Sacks.
Koch has said that without the federal grant the UI Labs’ effort would not have gained momentum until possibly two years later and that its greatest benefit will be to bring more engineering talent and focus downtown.
While the institute will fund research projects at universities and companies across the country, “we expect our project teams to spend time here,” Nowinski said. “Demonstrations on the manufacturing floor are going to be critical parts to those projects. And from an economic development standpoint, these are people that now are going to be coming here for potentially weeks or months at a time. You start to get critical mass.”
The institute is expected to announce its first projects in the coming months. It announced its second lab, focused on urban infrastructure, last week.
“UI Labs is a 20- to 30-year vision,” Nowinski said. “We don’t expect this to be our final home, but this is certainly where we’re going to start off.”
Twitter @chiconfidential
