Weston Centre Archives - SiliconHills

A mock-up of the new open community space at Geekdom, once it moves into the historic Rand building. Courtesy of Alamo Architects

By LAURA LOREK
Founder of Silicon Hills News

Converting a historic building into a modern-day tech coworking space to incubate hot new startups in downtown San Antonio isn’t an easy task.
But Irby Hightower of Alamo Architects and his team have managed to do just that. They took a former bank building and are transforming the seventh floor into a modern day workplace for geeks.
It’s a work in progress right now. In fact, it’s a hard-hat construction zone. But once finished, the new Geekdom at the Rand will have bike racks, showers, lockers, changing rooms, a nap room and transparent glass sliding doors on the offices to give the entire floor a wide-open feel.

Irby Hightower with Alamo Architects shows off the new design for Geekdom at the Rand building.

“The center offices open up from a smaller office to a larger office as a startup grows,” said Hightower. He presented drawings of the new space at a town hall meeting for members at Geekdom on Wednesday night.
The 1,200 square foot space will have 20 offices available for tech startups. Desks will rent for $200 a month. Community membership will remain at $50 a month. At the new site, the community space is larger and snakes throughout the floor.
An open kitchen also encourages interaction among the members. The entire place is built to encourage community collaboration.
The space also includes a large conference room and smaller conference rooms.
“The whole place really is meant to be one big community work environment,” Hightower said.
The new Geekdom is a little grungier than the 11th floor of the Weston Centre, current home of the site and a former law office.

A packed house turned out for the town hall meeting at Geekdom to unveil the new design for the site at the Rand building.

“We think that’s the right approach,” Hightower said. “The ceilings will have more character…It’s the kind of space you can experiment in and have more fun in.”
The space will also contain a lot of writeable surfaces and reliable high-speed Internet with lots of outlets for wired service as well as Wi-Fi.
The main floor of the building will also contain an events center with two Tricasters, portable live broadcasting studios, from NewTek for live streaming programming. The events center will also house a Ping-Pong table and other games.
The new Geekdom is expected to open on March 31st. It will feature the events center, the sixth floor for established tech companies and the seventh floor for new startups and community members.
In another 18 months, the entire Rand building will be vacated and will belong to Geekdom, said Lorenzo Gomez with Geekdom and the 80/20 Foundation.
They’ve talked about putting an electric sign on the roof of the building then with one letter that continues to flicker on and off, harkening back to the 1930s, when the building served as a department store.

Geekdom is a sponsor of SiliconHillsNews.com

Nicholas Longo, director of Geekdom

For years, the City of San Antonio has poured money into StarTech, formerly known as the San Antonio Technology Accelerator Initiative, to jumpstart the city’s high technology industry.
But now a new place, smack dab in the middle of downtown at the Weston Centre, might be able to do that with a collaborative workspace called Geekdom.
Geekdom is a nonprofit organization that will host technology workshops, lectures and events. It also provides office space to startups and desks to other technology workers through an application process. The center has an outreach effort to local high school and college students. Rackspace Chairman Graham Weston has put up the money to get the center established.
The desks will cost about $125 a month to rent and will come with a parking space. The community membership will cost around $50 and does not come with a dedicated space, Longo said. The offices will be open around the clock and members will have access codes and keys to get in to the building after hours.
“It’s like a gym membership for geeks,” he said.
Some people want to hang out all the time and write code, while others will want to just pop in and out from time to time, Longo said. The space hasn’t officially opened yet but one guy comes there every night after his regular job to code until midnight, he said.
Longo plans to have a strategic layout for assigning desks by putting “coders” next to “creatives” so that different groups get to network. And all residents (people who have desks) must give one hour of their time a week to help others, Longo said. Or they can put on a workshop once a month on programming languages, design or marketing. The idea is to create a collaborative environment, Longo said.
“Mentorship is the new classroom,” Longo said.

The Geekdom is nice. The 11th floor of the Weston Centre formerly housed a law firm. Large windows provide a panoramic view of downtown. Red, black and white decor pay homage to Rackspace, which is a sponsor of the site. The 15,000 square foot space includes a pool table, some arcade video game machines, a kitchen area with a couple of refrigerators stocked with beer and soda.
In addition to the offices, Longo wants to set up rooms for people to make things, ranging from painting to soldering metal to sculpture, robotics, Legos and more. It’s all about the Maker’s movement, Longo said, fashioned after Maker Faire and Make Magazine, which encourages people to build stuff from scratch.
Two weeks ago, the Geekdom hosted its first big event Startup Ignite’s all night Hack-a-thon, which garnered praise from its participants. It plans do another Hack-a-Thon on Nov. 18th at Geekdom.
Starting this Friday, San Antonio’s latest three day startup weekend takes place there.

Tag: Weston Centre

Geekdom Gets a Hip Makeover at its New Digs in the Historic Rand Building

Welcome to Geekdom