Just east of Albuquerque's Downtown core sits the shuttered First Baptist Church. Tucked on the northwest corner of the intersection of Broadway Boulevard and Central Avenue, the old brown-brick church contrasts the modern, glass-paneled building next to it.
That sleek structure is the University of New Mexico's Lobo Rainforest Building, a six-story, 158,000-square-foot blend of student housing, offices and startup and entrepreneur incubation space. Although the Rainforest Building doesn't share physical space with the old church, the two buildings are both part of the same development project — a seven-acre innovation district dubbed Innovate ABQ.
Plans for Innovate ABQ include renovating First Baptist Church and putting up several smaller buildings — between 15,000 and 20,000 square feet and anywhere between three to six stories tall — surrounding the Lobo Rainforest Building, plus a new parking structure. Once complete, it could mirror tech and innovation hubs in other states like Missouri and North Carolina.
"These developments take a long time," said Lisa Kuuttila, the CEO and chief economic development officer for UNM Rainforest Innovations. "If you look at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, that was like 40 years. St. Louis has Cortex [Innovation Community] that's three universities and businesses with quite a bit of property, and it's taken them probably 30 years to get to where they are.
"So we'd like to go faster, of course, but I think we're on a good trajectory."
Rainforest Innovations' mission is two-fold, Kuttila said — technology transfer and economic development. She said Rainforest Innovations receives about 90 invention disclosures out of UNM each year and close to 50 U.S. patents.
Those invention disclosures and patents can often turn into startup companies. There are close to 50 startups that have spun out from UNM currently active in New Mexico, including Circular Genomics, Osazda Energy and Armonica Technologies Inc.
Offices for Rainforest Innovations staff are in the Lobo Rainforest Building, the first and the largest structure to go up as part of the Innovate ABQ development.
The ground floor of the building is nearly 30,000 square feet and features — alongside the Rainforest Innovations offices — an open, central collaboration space, the Richard P. Feynman Center for Innovation from Los Alamos National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories' Downtown Center for Collaboration and Commercialization, offices for the University of New Mexico's Innovation Academy and office space for General Atomics Electromagnetics.
The top five floors are filled with more than 150 apartments to house over 300 UNM students. There's also a coffee shop and a small Nusenda Credit Union annex attached to the building.
Developed by Jacksonville, Florida-based Signet Real Estate Group with a price tag just north of $35 million, the Lobo Rainforest Building had its groundbreaking in June 2016 and opened in August 2017.
Click through the slideshow at the top of the page to see inside the Lobo Rainforest Building.
It gets its name from a book published in 2012 called "The Rainforest: The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley" by a pair of venture capitalists and startup founders, Greg Horowitt and Victor Hwang. The rainforest concept is what Kuuttila called a "bottom-up" model, meaning that the different startups and entrepreneurs the building serves determine what sort of resources and opportunities it offers.
Its spot next to the First Baptist Church in East Downtown was intentional, too, Kuuttila said.
"We began thinking about how to partner and how to stimulate an innovation district in Albuquerque, because that was something missing," Kuuttila said. "So, the idea behind this site was selecting a place that connected the university more so with the community in a partnership format."
The University of New Mexico raised around $6.5 million to purchase the seven-acre innovation site in 2013. The full site stretches from the intersection of Broadway and Central to Tijeras Avenue to the north and the railroad tracks to the west.
Central New Mexico Community College currently has a building set up on the southwest corner of the site as well, called the FUSE Makerspace. The space hosts workshops on trades like woodshopping and 3D printing, and includes a range of woodworking, metal fabrication and other types of equipment for booking.
Kuuttila said the full cost of the Innovate ABQ development is variable. UNM worked with Signet and a pair of local firms, Goodman Realty Group and Dekker Perich Sabatini, to set up a development agreement when the university first purchased the site.
"We want to retain that flexibility that if a company comes in and says, 'Hey, we're interested in one floor of a new building,' we would approach other partners and a developer and try to pull a deal together that makes sense," she said. "So, there's a lot of flexibility in that."
There's a bit more clarity around what the next development as part of Innovate ABQ could be, and that surrounds the abandoned First Baptist Church. UNM Rainforest Innovations wants to turn the church into a dynamic, technology-focused incubation space for creative entrepreneurs called "The Jungle."
UNM Rainforest Innovations has worked with Vince Kadlubek, one of the creatives behind the immersive art and entertainment company Meow Wolf, to develop a plan for renovating the church's sanctuary. The plan, Kuuttila said, is to combine elements of different technologies, like augmented and virtual reality, in combination with demonstration and production space.
"Our vision is really a place that's going to attract even more creative people to our state," she said.
Kuuttila said that Rainforest Innovations is currently raising money to construct The Jungle. The organization would need around $20 million "to get just to the shell condition," she said, and she hopes to see it up-and-running sometime in the next five years.
In addition to The Jungle, Kuuttila said she wants to see Innovate ABQ expand with more wet lab space for bioscience and other startup companies to use — something that she and others have seen as a significant demand in New Mexico.
There have been a series of other developments in recent years in the area surrounding the Innovate ABQ site. Those include the FatPipe ABQ co-working space located in the old Albuquerque High School library across Broadway Boulevard from the Lobo Rainforest Building and the Homewood Suites by Hilton Garden Inn across Central Avenue from First Baptist Church.
But the massive, modern Lobo Rainforest Building provides an anchor for Albuquerque's growing Innovation District, with the hopes of bringing more entrepreneurs, more startups and, in turn, more money into New Mexico.
