Bursting at the seams in its current location, incubator and tech hub Blue 1647 is moving its headquarters to a 250,000 square foot space inside Pilsen's Lacuna Artist Lofts, creating one of the largest co-working spaces in the US.
Blue 1647 CEO Emile Cambry told Chicago Inno that he's moving locations to keep up with demand and to create more space for the organization to hold desks, tech classes and other programming happening at Blue.
"It allows us to do 10 times more classes, 10 times more workshops, 25 times more cohorts and really start to ramp things up," Cambry said. "The biggest challenge (for us) has been space. Now we don't have space constraints."
Blue 1647's space, which will be called Blue Lacuna, will occupy four of the building's five floors, and offer new amenities like a gym, extra event space, film studio and a rooftop terrace. The space will continue to provide Blue's several hundred members maker equipment, access to workshops and classes, and other resources Blue tenants have used since the 1647 Blue Island Ave. location opened in Pilsen in 2013. All of the programming from the old Pilsen location will now happen at Lacuna.
Blue Lacuna is holding a soft opening on Friday, with a grand opening scheduled for February.
The added space will be a big benefit to its members, Cambry said. There will be designated quiet space, and areas intended to be more social. There will be more separation between adult and youth training workshops, and Blue will be able to grow some of its more popular programs like 1919, a women in tech accelerator.
"I look at what we’ve done up until now as a pilot," he said. "Now it's a chance for us to be truly be a legitimate force in the innovation space just because of the size, membership and the amount of scale we can now operate."
Alan Brothers, part of the creative team at Lacuna who helped facilitate Blue's relocation, called the collaboration a "game changer."
"Blue has been on our radar for awhile now," Brothers said. "It's such an impressive organization. I was already really impressed and admired Emile from a distance, so when our paths crossed and I found out that he had outgrown his space, it seemed like a great opportunity for him to join our campus and help us to do something that I think is unprecedented."
"It will allow us to create, in our mind, sort of an unparalleled incubator community," he added.
Blue 1647 has been a driving force behind inclusion and diversity in tech since it launched, and it has expanded across the Chicago, the US, and world as it aims to make technology more accessible to more communities.
