A Tour Through Autodesk’s Pier 9 Workshop, The Fabrication Facility Where Out-There Ideas Turn Into Reality


Autodesk is known primarily for enterprise software. It’s a great company in a lucrative market, but not exactly who you might expect to have an especially fun office space.

But for months now, people have been telling me that Autodesk’s new “workshop” that opened this past fall on Pier 9 on the San Francisco waterfront is a must-visit for TechCrunch video. So we headed over to see what all the buzz is about.

Autodesk’s Pier 9 workshop has pretty much every type of fabrication equipment that you can think of, from top-of-the-line 3D printers to CNC machines to laser cutters to woodwoorking tools. The idea is to put all of these things together in one space and make it available to two groups of people: Autodesk staffers, who develop the software that makes the machines run, and a group of “artists in residence“, who will use both the software and hardware in new and out-there ways.

It’s a pretty incredible space, both because of the impressive equipment and the wildly creative things that have been produced using it. Take it all in in the video embedded above.