Hasta La Ideas

That crusty industrial building may not look like much, but it’s special for two reasons. One, it’s located in the Canadian capital of Ottawa, a city with little history of industry, meaning buildings like that are not commonplace. And two, it’s going to become a creative incubation hub to the tune of some CAD $30 million in funding.

The Bayview Yards Innovation Centre, as it’s called, is nearly 46,000 square feet of raw space that will house a rentable digital media and animation lab, meeting and presentation spaces, design studios and a makerspace dedicated to “industrial design, prototyping, fabricating and additive and subtractive manufacturing.”

The aforementioned $30 mil in funding, half of which is from the city and half from the province, isn’t a mere gesture of largesse; the bread is intended to provide “a big boost to the creative sector that has been waiting to emerge in this city for decades.” The local talent-drain problem is well known, with creative types easily lured to cities like Toronto or New York; by giving, say, the industrial design grads at Ottawa’s Carleton University a cool place to make stuff, the government bodies reckon they can hang on to their citizens while creating jobs and wealth.

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