At AIA25 in Boston, Autodesk announced new connections between Esri and Autodesk Construction Cloud (ACC) with its cloud-native Autodesk Forma platform for AEC. The award-winning platform, which Architosh has written about many times, is technology based on Autodesk’s SpacemakerAI acquisition several years ago and represents one of Autodesk’s three “industry clouds.”
Forma News
The next-generation pre-design platform runs in the cloud via a modern web browser. It offers a battery of pre-design and early-stage analysis features for building design and development, including building site analysis and optimization, 3D modeling and massing exploration, environmental analysis, including sun hours, daylight potential, wind, microclimates, and embodied carbon analysis. It also includes the new Forma Board for collecting and presenting ideas to teams and clients.
Autodesk Forma and Esri are now connected.
In short, Autodesk’s next-generation design platform for architecture continues to improve with additional third-party and internal connections.
Now Forma is connected to industry-leading spatial context data from Esri. Available from the Autodesk App Store, ArcGIS for Autodesk Forma (still in beta) gives architects and designers the contextual site data they need to make superior design decisions. This data from the Esri connection provides geographic data for buildings, zoning, roads, and more.
Kathleen Kewley, Esri director of AEC global business development notes:
We’re excited to strengthen our partnership with Autodesk in creating a more cohesive project experience for the AECO industry. This will improve operational efficiency and drive better business outcomes by bringing Esri’s rich collection of data into Autodesk Forma.
This new Esri connection further strengthens the main thesis of Autodesk Forma, a design tool platform that will enable the intelligent development of buildings across a range of measurable data.
ACC Connection
On the internal connection front, Autodesk’s new connections between Forma and Autodesk Construction Cloud (known in the industry as ACC) streamlines connections between design and construction workflows.
Soon, ACC users will begin to see Forma added as a navigation module within ACC as the two cloud platforms form connections. Users will be able to move swiftly between ACC’s construction management tools and Forma’s pre-design and schematic design tools with what Autodesk calls a “connected navigation experience.”
This builds on an existing connection between Autodesk Docs, the company’s common data environment (CDE), and Forma Boards. In fact, Autodesk Docs is now available to all Forma users, regardless of whether they are standalone or AEC Collection subscribers, which strengthens Autodesk Docs as the backbone for the Forma industry cloud.
Readers can learn more about all this over here at Autodesk.
