Over the past several years, Autodesk has expanded its facilities in San Francisco to include the Autodesk Gallery and the beautiful offices at One Market Street that showcase the use of Autodesk software and industry-leading sustainable design practices. The next phase in Autodesk’s Bay Area growth took place this week at the opening of a new 27,000 square foot facility called the Autodesk Workshop at Pier 9. This new location supports the company’s vision of helping everyone imagine, design and create a better world by providing facilities to research and develop software, tools, apps, communities and advanced workflows for manufacturing, life sciences, digital art and the maker community.
The opening of the Autodesk Workshop at Pier 9, which is located along the shores of San Francisco Bay and a short walk from Autodesk’s current San Francisco facilities, was attended by Autodesk President and CEO, Carl Bass; San Francisco Mayor, Ed Lee; President of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, David Chiu; Executive Director of the Port of San Francisco, Monique Moyer; as well as select customers, partners and other representatives from the City of San Francisco and Port of San Francisco.
The Autodesk Workshop at Pier 9 includes facilities for Autodesk, our partners and employees to have hands-on experience building and experimenting with a wide range of materials including wood, metal and composites. Projects can be produced using basic construction, CNC prototyping and 3D printing workflows for digital fabrication and additive manufacturing. A dizzying list of all the equipment in the Workshop can be found here. The Workshop is open to select Autodesk employees and partners who have completed required training and safety courses, and will be a central element of the Autodesk Artist in Residence program.
The new location is also home to the Autodesk Consumer Group, a team dedicated to helping unlock the creativity in everybody by making a portfolio of fun, creative tools and vibrant communities accessible to kids, hobbyists, aspiring artists and designers, and makers around the world. The Autodesk Instructables team has moved from their original and much smaller offices and is happy to be under a single roof with the rest of the consumer team.
The Autodesk Bio/Nano/Programmable Matter group of Autodesk Research is also housed in the Autodesk Workshop at Pier 9. This team will use a new on-site meta-lab for researching and developing new tools that will explore the use of biology as a design medium, and will also serve as a testing ground for Autodesk’s scientific hardware efforts.
Media coverage of the opening of the Autodesk Workshop at Pier 9 has appeared in the San Francisco Business Times and GigaOm.
