What Is Autodesk’s Forma, What It’s Not and What It Will Be

The Forma that was being shown at Autodesk University now appears to be a rebranding, update and enhancement of Spacemaker, the AEC generative design program that Autodesk acquired in late 2020. It has the layout tools, multiple configurations and blocking studies of Spacemaker and incorporates at least some of Formit, Autodesk’s architectural concept modeler, which is similar to SketchUp.

“Autodesk Forma is the first set of capabilities of the industry cloud for AEC,” says the Autodesk announcement. In other words, this unveiling is just the first blush, a Part 1, if you will. The all-encompassing, cradle-to-grave platform is able to assist the whole of the design, build and operation community with all the software it needs, with many AEC apps under one roof all working off a unified database—that ambitious goal is still to be realized.

Part 1, or the “first set,” expands Autodesk’s ability to help in the early design phase of a building or structure design—that phase in which ideas are flying but few have landed, when buildings are modeled with block shapes, facades with sketches, comments with Post-Its. Only now, it will all happen with software.

The software will not only replace but also enhance manual methods. For example, Forma will let its users determine the outcome of a multitude of possible scenarios. Rather than choose between a handful of options for building shapes and orientations and office layouts, why not have software that generates hundreds of possible scenarios and predicts how well each of them works and very conveniently ranks them for you?

It seemed odd for Autodesk to acquire Spacemaker, a 4-year-old Norwegian startup that optimized buildings and interior spaces, for $240 million. That was in December 2020. The world was in the grip of a pandemic. There was no need to optimize commercial space—there was a surplus of it. Companies were letting everyone work from home and wound up with so much vacant space that they were reneging or renegotiating their leases. A hundred and fifty Norwegians at Spacemaker may have been wondering what they were going to do next when a white knight came from America and offered to buy the company for a vast sum. Was he crazy?

Crazy like a fox, perhaps. Autodesk’s CEO, Andrew Anagnost, had promised to expand the company’s AEC dominance into facility management and operation. He did not have his eyes on Spacemaker’s generative design—Autodesk already had generative design, both for product design and architecture. The company’s Toronto office in the city’s MaRS Discovery District was created with Dynamo, its AEC generative design more than 2 years ago. It was not Spacemaker’s building architecture that Autodesk was interested in but its software architecture. The company needed something that could serve as the cornerstone of a cloud-based, data-driven design/build/operate platform. Buying Spacemaker provided a framework for an AECO platform, the entire cradle-to-grave set of cloud-based applications that would give it a thoroughly modern, one-stop shopping mall for architects, engineers, builders and owners. With it, Autodesk could hope to unite a multitude of AEC apps of its own making and acquired, present and future.

And Spacemaker is an olive branch (in the form of a Revit-to-Forma plug-in) for disgruntled Revit users.

Forma is not a replacement for Revit, Autodesk is quick to say, in an effort to appease Revit users who might be thinking otherwise. Forma works with Revit, which remains the main building information modeling (BIM) tool from Autodesk. It is said to console Revit users feeling alienated by the company’s attention to cloud-based applications more than an absolute truth. The truth is that Forma is to be the AEC design and build cloud-based, database driven platform of the future and Revit is the legacy desktop, file-based BIM modeling program has been given a live link to it.

But the plan for Forma seems to be an all-encompassing AEC platform that covers what happens after design—the building and construction, the ownership and maintenance, the whole cradle-to-grave story of a building.

A modern design/build/operate platform is one from which Autodesk can carry on its sustainability crusade.

“Two billion more people [are] expected to call our planet home by 2050,” Anagnost has said, calling for sustainability, if only by example. Autodesk aims for LEED certification in its offices worldwide. But with the coordination that a design/build/operate platform allows, Autodesk can affect sustainability directly for its customers. Owners, previously provided with a building and a set of plans at a handover, had to make the best use of energy with the building that was given to them. With a design/build/operate platform, owners can be involved in the concept and design of a building, building in energy efficiency, so to speak, rather than trying to wring it out.

“Forma gives architecture professionals the agility to work iteratively rather than sequentially between planning and detailed design, supercharging what they can accomplish,” said Amy Bunszel, executive vice president of Architecture, Engineering and Construction Design Solutions at Autodesk.

Having a platform for AECO instead of forcing one monolithic application to play with others should allow for the easy movement of data and the movement of users between applications on the platform. For example, using a solar analysis package that calculates heat from the sun throughout the day and over the course of a year as a function of a building’s location and orientation can serve as input to a building design program and result in a building that requires less energy to maintain.

Forma creates concepts of a building in the context of the building site, taking into account the nearby terrain (a 3D site plan), utilities, where it is on Earth, its polar orientation, and so on, and delivers several possible building configurations.

You pick from among the resulting models the ones that best suit your purposes. The models are coarse but provide a general idea of what type of building could work. Then it’s off to Revit to fill in the details necessary to build it.

Forma forms a “file-less” sync with Revit files. This means there is constant communication between Forma’s database and Revit files. If one changes, so does the other, through a live link, in other words. There is no need to monitor a file for changes and reimport it when you are told of changes. Both models are automatically kept up to date.

Forma is now included in the Autodesk AEC Collection. A fully formed Forma will tie all of Autodesk’s many AEC applications under one roof, including Spacemaker technology, Formit (Autodesk’s alternative to SketchUp), Revit, Autodesk Construction Cloud and BIM Cloud.

Autodesk Forma is available for $1,445/year, a savings of 33 percent over the $180/month rate.