Shawn Wallace, lab director at AS220, sits in the arts collective’s lab.

The Providence Journal / Glenn Osmundson

PROVIDENCE — The first incarnation of the avant-garde art and music collective known as AS220 was in leased space on the third floor of the decidedly mainstream Providence Performing Arts Center.

It didn’t take long for AS220 to wear out its welcome.

“They were probably imagining something more of a James Taylor/coffeehouse thing,” says Bert Crenca, the bald, fiercely goateed cofounder of AS220. “We were putting on hip-hop shows and raves. People graffitied the hallways and elevators ... It was not the right place for what we wanted to do.”

In the 23 years since, a lot has changed for AS220, which stands for “alternative” or “artist” space 220 (as in 220 Weybosset, the address of their first home in PPAC), not the least of which is its standing in Providence.

The nonprofit organization has evolved from an upstart just barely getting by in a crumbling downtown, into a social touchstone and a bona-fide real estate player in a revitalized part of downcity.

With two properties valued at nearly $4 million and a $12-million development in the works, the organization now has a staff of about 30 and an annual budget of $1.3 million. AS220 has arrived squarely in the mainstream.

The city and its major universities now look to AS220 as a bridge between the city’s arts, technology, and academic worlds. The key is a plan AS220 announced last week to bring design and fabrication technology developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to a downtown space for public use.

The space represents the first major foray of the venerable Cambridge university into Providence, and would be the state’s first FabLab, a project by MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms that encourages local entrepreneurs to take their ideas from the drawing board to the product prototyping needed to start a small business.

The labs are also meant to expose primary and secondary schoolchildren to design technology as many public schools are cutting such hands-on programs (if they had them at all) in order to meet budget demands or to address other educational priorities.

AS220 is purchasing the MIT technology, which consists of industrial-grade fabrication and electronic tools and open-source software — computer programs that can be redistributed and modified free of copyright constraints.

By January, it hopes to have the technology open to the public in its Empire Street location, but the goal is to move the lab in about two years into its own two-floor space in the Mercantile Block, a building on Washington Street that the organization is developing into a mixed-use space of artist residences, arts studios and retail.

MIT’s technology package, which has been set up in FabLabs in low-income neighborhoods from New York to South Africa, gives organizations such as AS220 the opportunity to own design equipment and software that would otherwise be too costly, says Shawn Wallace, the director of AS220’s future FabLab. It also brings AS220 into MIT’s network of FabLabs, meaning a wealth of possibilities for collaboration and idea sharing.

Mayor David N. Cicilline sees AS220 as an essential driver in bolstering the city’s “knowledge economy,” which is the creation of jobs and investment through research laboratories, think tanks, and computer-technology firms, as opposed to old-line manufacturing, and has put up the money to prove it.

Since 1993, the city has loaned AS220 over $2.59 million to purchase three downtown properties, and granted it some degree of tax relief because its buildings provide low- to moderate-income housing.

“One of the more important parts of the collaboration with MIT is that it links the arts community to the more commercial sector of industrial design,” Cicilline said. “The focus is on how to create job opportunities from this…. We’re hoping Providence can become the center for design ideas and fabrication ideas.”

Students and professors at the local universities have been a key part of the AS220’s success through the years through their own contributions, but the universities, as institutions, have had little to no contact with AS220.

That will probably change, university officials say.

At a fundraiser this week for the FabLab (AS220 is looking to raise $50,000), representatives from Brown, the Rhode Island School of Design, and Johnson and Wales University all talked about the significance of the project for their universities and the city in general.

“With the emergence of the FabLab, we are asking, how can the university, as an institution, collaborate with AS220?” says RISD director of public engagement Peter Hocking. “We’re at the beginnings of those conversations, but it is clear that the connection with MIT and the resources coming to AS220 presents to the city of Providence a great new opportunity.”

Francis X. Tweedie, dean of Johnson & Wales University’s School of Technology, says he would like to see the university and others have a financial stake in the lab. “Buying collaboratively reduces costs, while we all share the advantages,” he said.

Richard Fishman, director of Brown University’s Creative Arts Council, which represents the university’s arts departments, says the project fits with the university’s interest in community service, globalization, and wider access to cutting-edge technology.

The FabLab is another example of AS220’s evolution into a sophisticated, wide-ranging social entity capable of fluidly moving from the art house to the corporate world to the realm of techno-geeks and industrial designers.

Its two downtown spaces, the Empire Street headquarters and the former Dreyfus Hotel, on Washington Street, compose a veritable campus for the city’s innovation class.

In those buildings, AS220 runs a bar and a performance space, offers programs geared to inner-city youths, leases out storefronts to local businesses, provides living and work space for artists, and runs a dark room and printmaking shop open to the public for a fee.

“AS220 is really in the business of community building, with arts and self-expression as the vehicle,” AS220 founder Crenca says. “It’s about going back to the idea of what cities used to be: centers of exchange, commerce and ideas.”

pmarcelo@projo.com