The Center for Lost Arts will close the doors to its Goose Island space at the end of August as founder Charles Adler hunts for a new, and likely permanent, home for Lost Arts.
The Goose Island space is the second iteration of an experiment in coworking, making, entrepreneurship, engineering and art from Adler, who also cofounded crowdfunding platform Kickstarter.
It started with a Kickstarter-funded, month-long pop up in an old meat freezer in the West Loop in 2015, where a cohort of 50 members, including artists, engineers and designers, worked on a variety of projects, ranging from coffee storage vessels to building a boat.
The next stage was the 25,000 square-foot Goose Island space, which opened last summer at 909 W. Bliss Street. Housed in an old storage facility, it functioned as combination coworking, maker and events space, and included workspace, machinery for prototyping, a loading dock, room for a gallery show and fiber Internet. There was a membership fee to work out of the space.
Adler says he intended the Goose Island location to be a six month experiment to better understand operations and membership structure, as well as test that there was interest in the community to "soften the barriers" between creative and engineering disciplines. Due to organic interest from the community and Adler's ability to extend the lease, he decided to stick around until the end of August of this year.
Now Adler is ready to find a third home for the Lost Arts community, one that he intends to be permanent.
"We don’t want to close," Adler said. "But for the sake of providing the best experience that we can as well as ensuring that we can fulfill that bigger vision we have, it is probably time. This was always intended to be temporary anyway."
Adler said he wants the new space to be "state-of-the-art" and "awesome," with space for equipment for additional mediums, such as metalworking and ceramics.
"Each step of the way has been a build up of the last," he noted. "The space that we envision for the next version will be significantly more built out: higher end equipment, a café space, social space, along with an events space."
Adler said the length of the hiatus depends on where they decide to move next. He is searching for a place that is 25,000 to 30,000 square-feet and centrally located within the city.
Lost Arts, which is an LLC and made a profit on the last space, currently has 163 members. Once the space closes in August, these members won't have to pay fees. In the meantime, Lost Arts will live on in a series of events at spaces across the city with several of their current partners, such as Cards Against Humanity, Illinois Institute of Technology, and Herman Miller. Adler said these are currently being planned, but declined to go into further detail just yet.
"The heart of it, and the thing that keeps us going and keeps us together, is the fact that we are the community," he said. "Losing access to the tools, it’s certainly a big part of the story, but I think there is great value in the connections that have been made for those people. Space or not, that will continue."
The Goose Island space, which will be redeveloped once Lost Arts moves out, was a learning experience as well as proof to Adler that his vision for a cross-disciplinary space is viable. He pointed to a lighting stand created by designers in the space for civic tech art project Wabash Lights, the collaboration between engineer Roman Titus and technologist Justin Smith of IoT startup Sojourn Fare, and an ongoing Lost Arts Slack channel devoted to woodworking questions, as examples of this vision in action.
"The whole reason for me doing this and my whole interest in doing this is watching people do their best work," he said. "That’s what’s really gotten us to stay open as long as we have in the current space and so that same excitement...is driving us to get to a new space as quickly as we can."
