Autodesk, Inc. today announced it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Spacemaker for $240 million net of cash...
The acquisition of Spacemaker provides Autodesk with a powerful platform to drive modern, user-centric automation – powered by AI – and accelerate outcome-based design capabilities for architects.
— Autodesk
According to Autodesk, the Oslo, Norway-based Spacemaker "uses cloud-based, artificial intelligence (AI), and generative design to help architects, urban designers, and real estate developers make more informed early-stage design decisions faster and enables improved opportunities for sustainability from the start. By evaluating the best options from the outset, Spacemaker helps architects maximize their clients’ long-term property investments."
14 Comments
Tomorrow: Autodesk, due to a misunderstanding, acquires the rights to the board game Monopoly. A spokesperson said, "We thought it was something else, we swear."
Sure, buy this company, spend zero on fixing your banged up software. This is what Anti-trusts are about; break this company up.
Yuck, they're probably going to roll it into Revit now.
So they have money to buy companies but not fix revit?
They know it takes a lot of money and training, not to mention industry coordination, to move on from Revit. The AEC business is stuck with Revit until some other product comes in and becomes the new monopoly.
That's like $30m per buzzword.
yes, but will the software help predict my client's decisions? like, for example, asking to redesign a roofline and moving load bearing partitions after we've already completed final engineering calculations and about to acquire our building permit? No? not interested.
That's exactly why they're going to roll it into existing software ... at the risk of bloating and making it worse.
Despite my snark I'm all for giving technological innovations a shot but if we do, we must accept that our roles will potentially shift with the inevitable adoption of AI into our practice. We as architects think that what we do is too specialized to automate but I can assure you this is just the beginning—for better or for worse. In a way some of this could be a good thing because so much overhead goes toward producing and overseeing the minutiae, consistency, and coherence of complex drawing sets which I think a majority of us welcome ways that technology can improve upon how tedious that work can be. I welcome the idea of AI improving our work and helping us make better decisions, but like many I wonder if it starts to make some of what we do obsolete—hence the shifting of our roles I mentioned earlier. That said, touting the product's ability to "maximize their clients’ long-term property investments" makes me cringe
I foresee more and more pure "designers" i.e stylists, who decorate buildings (Picking colors, cladding materials, formal options) while AI software does the grunt work of site studies, design options, and perhaps one day coordination as well. This squeezes out architects who used to focus on these, particuarly young ones who have yet to grasp the parameters necessary to "pilot" these software. So the bifurcation between technical and design folks may widen yet.
AI and Predictive Analysis is becoming part of every other discipline - Medicine, Mechanical Engineering etc etc. So why not Architecture?
Oh I get it - its the "who moved my cheese" story...
I don't have a problem with AI being involved in Architecture. I have a problem with Autodesk buying innovation instead of developing it themselves.
Oh, and don't forget Trimble—the world's largest manufacturer and seller of surveying equipment—owns SketchUp, Tekla, and Gehry Technologies... just to name a few. Buying software companies that develop better software/hardware you do is pretty common when you're a big software/hardware development company (I'm looking at you Microsoft, Apple, Google, Facebook....).
b3tadine is right—Antitrust much?
How many lines of code to VE everything interesting out of the project?
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