“Two billion more people expected to call our planet home by 2050,” said Andrew Anagnost, CEO of Autodesk, who seems intent on making sure they will all have a place to live. “90% of the population growth will be in cities,” it says on the website of Spacemaker, which Autodesk has recently announced it will acquire to help it address this problem. While making homes for billions of people will no doubt require paving over green fields on the outskirts of cities, Autodesk wants to do it in the most sustainable way: by reducing waste. Anagnost mentions the 30% of the material on a construction site is wasted.
Autodesk’s collection of building design software, including Revit and AutoCAD, may not be able to start design soon enough to suit the expected population explosion. So, the company reached across the world—to Norway, with visions of sustainability, pristine fjords, snow-capped mountains and unlogged forests—found Spacemaker and put $240 million on the table to get software that delivers, in the most optimum way, the ability to cut up a green field for their new buildings and parking lots.
Spacemaker, a 4-year-old start-up, employs 150 people and is headquartered in Oslo, Norway. Its software helps architects and urban planners lay out sites for residential and mixed-use developments. Spacemaker’s customers are in Scandinavia and Europe, with some doing business in the U.S. Its customers are far from the cities that are experiencing the population explosion mentioned. Of the 20 fastest-growing cities, 15 are located in Asia, with the rest in Africa. China by itself has seven of the 20 fastest-growing cities and opts to house new city dwellers in high-rises. Spacemaker cannot currently handle high-rises.
While the justification of the Spacemaker acquisition on the grounds of its sustainability appears to be forced, Spacemaker fits nicely on Autodesk’s road map to modernize its software offerings as it attempts to pull away from millions of legacy users tied to aging desktop software. Spacemaker is cloud based and employs artificial intelligence, checking off two requirements for modern software.
How Does Spacemaker Work?
Architects, urban designers and real estate developers can use Spacemaker in green field development (the earliest stages of design on undeveloped land). Given requirements, such as number of rooms, apartments, offices, buildings, etc.) and considering restraints like terrain, roads, surrounding buildings, traffic conditions, maps, wind, lighting, traffic, zoning, and so on, Spacemaker will unfurl all sorts of possible layouts and, according to the company, be fully conscious of sustainability and be able to rank and sort the results, helping you find the optimum layout.
“Spacemaker will automatically set it up for you,” said Carl Christensen, cofounder and CTO of Spacemaker, who talked to us via Zoom. “You just punch in the address, and you have all of that. You can have different levels of assistance in how Spacemaker will develop the site, different priorities and different goals. Spacemaker does a lot of analysis that simulates the world in different ways. At the same time, you have generative and parametric capabilities, so you can rather explore a lot of different options. You can see the consequences of those options in many different criteria and be able to discuss the consequences of going with different options easily.
“Spacemaker is cloud based. You can share the results with different stakeholders. They can interact, discuss the different elements and the goals of the project that they care about, like space utilization, density, outdoor areas, daylight in apartments, and so on. If you are combining [a] commercial and residential sector, it can be done in one platform.
“Spacemaker can easily accommodate rapid changes. It can make developments more environmentally sustainable. You can move much more quickly with large spaces and then work in greater detail on smaller spaces, including sending the information to other software, like Revit, or other tools that deal in detail.”
This optimization of space reminds us of generative design, a technology Autodesk already has in house and used primarily for product design but also for space planning. We saw its result in Autodesk’s Toronto office. Not the same, Autodesk tells us. Spacemaker is used for exterior space planning. Spacemaker operates on a larger scale. In other words, we did not pay a ton of money for something we already owned.
Carl Christensen, cofounder and CTO at Spacemaker, talks to us from his Oslo home. (Picture courtesy of LinkedIn.)
"Real-estate developers in Norway are at the forefront of the digital transformation in the building sector, resulting in increased project profitability, and critically, improving our ability to combat climate change with more sustainable real estate developments,” said Daniel Kjørberg Siraj, CEO of OBOS, who is delighted that this deal gives Spacemaker “the scale that they need in order to be impactful.”
“Autodesk shares our goal to create a healthier planet for everyone and is uniquely positioned to more rapidly place our product in the hands of planning teams everywhere,” said Havard Haukeland, CEO and cofounder of Spacemaker.
We are reminded of the two billion people—all needing homes, most of them living in cities—and the cities’ most efficient answer to manage the rapid influx of people coming from the countryside, most evident in China, but also occurring in India and Southeast Asia.
We’re not there yet, says Christensen. We understand. Why should they concern themselves with such far-off problems? The Scandinavian countryside does not have millions of peasants seeking jobs in the cities.
We ask Christensen a few questions, mostly about what Spacemaker can do.
Can you do parking lots?
We do parking lots. And they are parametric and generative. With optimization for the entire site or with many buildings. You can work with alternatives, like what happens when traffic changes, or buildings change, or with apartment optimization. With a parking mix, you can work with height optimization and view line optimization.
What kind of simulation can be done with Spacemaker?
Spacemaker can do CFD (wind simulation) that is completely automated. Also, noise simulation with full reflection. The instant machine learning Spacemaker is based upon picks up on different elements brought in at high speed, iterating with a lot of detail and information. You also get a high quality compliance level that can help with big decisions, including those dependent on the sustainability factors.
What is your background? Urban planning? Programming?
I’m one of the three founders. One of my cofounders is an architect. He felt the pain and saw the problems, the decision-making process. He felt that he was not providing the developers with good information and also that he could not communicate well with them. That’s where it started. I have a degree in computer science and a parallel degree in administration. Most of my career has been spent building products and building product teams. My passion is to find the most useful values. And do focused product development. This was how we approached the problems. We realized that we had to do all the heavy lifting, solving some very hard mathematical problems to deliver all these analyses—also the general development and tie the GIS directly to the terrain. We had to do it in the cloud, in a web-based environment, and make it collaborative. It had to be highly visual, 3D. That’s hard to do in a browser. We had to build a team with highly mathematical data scientists, high quality software engineers and visual interface designers.