Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times
A large cooperative space will include a full metal shop, a wood shop and 3-D printers. It is expected to be finished as early as summer 2014.
Across the partition from the roboticist who was making coffee tables with magnetized cubes, an artist was boxing up woodcuts that, when held to the ear, sounded like a forest. Beyond him, just past the software designer on the treadmill, a muscular man in a T-shirt tinkered with his design for a motorcycle.
This eclectic mix of entrepreneurs, among the first tenants of a communal space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, did not in any way resemble workers in a traditional factory, but their landlords and city officials hope they represent the seedlings of a rebirth of manufacturing in New York City.
The loftlike space, known as New Lab, is to be unveiled by local and state officials on Thursday. It is a precursor to a much bigger manufacturing cooperative scheduled to open in about 18 months in a neighboring building.
The idea driving the project was to bring together a variety of creative people and have them share equipment, like laser cutters and three-dimensional printers, that would be too costly for them to rent or buy on their own. David Belt, the developer of New Lab, said he hoped to do for manufacturers what the M.I.T. Media Lab in Cambridge, Mass., had done for technology researchers.
"New York City is supposed to be sort of a design hub," Mr. Belt said in an interview. "I was frustrated seeing so much time and effort pumped into software. I'm more interested in products and hardware."
Manufacturing in the city has been dying a long, slow death as a source of jobs and prosperity. The Navy Yard, where thousands of men built battleships for World War II, is helping Brooklyn buck that trend.
In the last three years, Brooklyn has been the only borough in the city to add manufacturing jobs, according to the Center for an Urban Future, a research organization. Though it gained just 39 manufacturing jobs from 2010 to 2012, that was a sharp reversal from the previous decade, when Brooklyn lost nearly 24,000 jobs in manufacturing.
"This is probably one of the most positive signs in manufacturing in years," said Jonathan Bowles, executive director of the Center for an Urban Future. "We're seeing for the first time in a while a real entrepreneurial boom in manufacturing in Brooklyn. The question is, will it continue?"
The activity in Brooklyn has not been purely organic: It has been fertilized with infusions of money and other financial support from city and state agencies.
All told, about $1 billion has been invested in transforming the Navy Yard into an industrial park on the East River, and about a quarter of that money has come from public sources, said Andrew H. Kimball, the chief executive of the Brooklyn Navy Yard Development Corporation.
The cost of renovating the bigger building that will house New Lab will be about $60 million, about $42 million of which is coming from private sources and a package of tax credits, Mr. Kimball said. The rest was supplied by a regional council of the Empire State Development Corporation, the City Council and the Brooklyn borough president's office.
Once the building is ready, possibly by the summer of 2014, Mr. Belt plans to spend an additional $21 million outfitting 84,000 square feet that could be home to as many as 350 jobs. Some of that money, too, is expected to come from the regional council.
The bigger space will include a full metal shop, a wood shop, and 3-D printers for making and honing prototypes of new products, Mr. Belt said. He said that communal core, which will fill about 40 percent of the space, would be operated by a nonprofit company.
Already, Mr. Belt said, there is a waiting list of potential tenants in the smaller lab, which he calls the beta space. He said he needed to choose carefully to bring together people with the most mutually beneficial array of skills and knowledge.
His first set of tenants revealed his leaning toward the intellectual side of product design.
At one end of the room, Jessica Banks of RockPaperRobot was shaping cubes of wood to be parts of a "float table" held together with magnets and steel cables. Close by, Eric J. Forman had been up all night producing TreeShell, a disc of birch that produces sounds of the forest, much like a seashell that suggests the sounds of the sea. He was racing a deadline to deliver to the MoMA Design Store.
Several work spaces away sat Edward Jacobs of D.N.I., a design consulting company, who was working on several projects at once. He was designing a motorcycle chassis for Triumph, a system for producing photosynthesis for an underground park and a line of small gadgets like pocketknives.
"The ability to have manufacturing at your fingertips is really a dream come true for anybody that deals with concept design," said Mr. Jacobs, who like many of the new tenants of the Navy Yard, lives nearby in Brooklyn.
Normally, he said, the cost of making prototypes is 10 to 20 times the cost of mass producing the same piece. "To be able to have those facilities here really allows you to get to market much faster and it allows you an affordable way to materialize your concepts."
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