Platformization in the built environment: the political techno-economy of Building Information Modeling

ABSTRACT

The digital transformation of architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) is being hailed as a panacea for the sectors’ problems, with major actors in government and business promoting it as a benevolent harbinger of greater efficiency, productivity, better quality, and environmental performance. However, advancing digitalization in AEC is intertwined with a distinct political-economic logic that involves new constraints, dependencies, and a reconfiguration of power relations. Specifically, Building Information Modeling (BIM) as a digital convergence of three-dimensional building models, databases, and interfaces for multidisciplinary collaboration operates as a runway technology for digitalization and an entry point for platformization impelled by global software giants, such as this article’s empirical case of software company Autodesk and its BIM product portfolio shows. BIM’s linkage of governmental policy strategies with the techno-economic platform logic of software subscription models, open application programming interfaces, and cloud-enabled collaboration ensures management and control of construction data and software interoperability. At the same time, BIM’s techno-economic and political configuration facilitates a near-monopolistic structure in the global architecture and construction software market. It thus grants one hegemonic company immense power to define what formats, standards, and data for building models and design processes are being used in creating the built environment. The expansive, intersecting logics of assetization, platformization, and datafication have been taking hold in the AEC sector, raising questions about their stratifying effects in the built environment and society.

KEYWORDS:

• Platformization
• platform capitalism
• building information modeling
• software
• data
• built environment

Introduction

In late 2020, software corporation Autodesk acquired the technology startup Spacemaker, a cloud-based, artificial intelligence-supported software for urban development, for $240 million. Spacemaker promises the ‘best possible’ urban planning solution for a site through quick generation, optimization, and iteration of design options along specific input criteria. Shortly before that, Google/Alphabet subsidiary Sidewalk Labs launched Delve, a similar generative design tool for urban development powered by machine learning. Generative design tools typically capture and deploy available building data from public and private sources to create, explore, and rank multiple design variants. To feed their algorithms, they critically rely on existing building data made available not least through Building Information Modeling (BIM) which has been considered a runway technology for the digital transformation, datafication, and automation of architecture and construction (Miettinen and Paavola, 2014; Whyte and Hartmann, 2017; Braun et al., 2022).

Technically, BIM represents the digital convergence of three-dimensional (3D) building models, databases including information about materials, components, costs, simulations, and interfaces for multidisciplinary and interorganizational collaboration or for offering construction products or materials for sale. It allows for generating, storing, processing, sharing and transferring large amounts of diverse kinds of data, from construction costing, site- and object-specific use of materials to collaborative relationships and individual participants’ performance (Zhang and Ashuri, 2018).

Over the past years, digital technologies such as BIM have increasingly been hailed as a panacea for a broad range of ills afflicting the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry from poor project performance via budget overspends, failure to deliver on time, and dwindling profitability to environmental harm (see Paavola and Miettinen, 2019; Braun and Kropp, 2021; Braun et al., 2022). Major actors, such as governments, international consultancy firms, Big Tech and software providers, promote digitalization and automation in the AEC sector as benevolent harbingers of greater efficiency, productivity, improved quality and environmental performance. However, this paper shows that the advance of digital and data-based technologies in architecture and construction is inextricably intertwined with a distinct political-economic logic that involves new constraints and dependencies and a reconfiguration of power relations.

Attending to the idiom of co-production (Jasanoff, 2004), we argue that socio-digital technologies like BIM and generative design, along with their related application programming interfaces (APIs), cloud computing, and data interoperability systems, are co-produced with specific forms of political-economic order that can be described in terms of assetization and platformization in digital capitalism. Moreover, the co-production of socio-digital technologies and arrangements and new ways of ordering economic life and relations of production, exchange and value creation will, in one way or another, have an impact on what formats, standards, and data for building models and design processes are being used, and thereby ultimately affect what is being built. In this paper, we ask the following questions: What agendas, logics, and constellations of forces shape the co-productive interplay between the digital transformation and the political-economic reconfiguration of the AEC sector? And what social implications for the future of architecture, construction, and the built environment are to be expected from these intersecting processes?

We use the empirical case of the software company Autodesk and its BIM product portfolio to retrace the techno-economic and political developments enabling the ongoing platformization processes in AEC. The case study reveals how BIM’s techno-economic and political configuration facilitates a near-monopolistic platformization that prompts new constraints and implications for the AEC sector, its actors, and the built environment. The company has secured a dominant position in the global design and construction software market by altering software license contracts, subscription models, opening its APIs to third-parties, and advancing cloud-based interoperability between its own products while inhibiting interoperability between its products and those of its competitors. The case thus demonstrates very clearly how the expansive logic of digital capitalism is taking hold in the AEC sector and how the construction sector is becoming ‘platform-ready’ (Helmond, 2015; Hind et al., 2022) by way of disseminating BIM.

We build on and bring together the, still incipient, STS literature on the socio-digital transformation processes of architecture and construction (e.g. Neff et al., 2010; Cardoso Llach, 2017, 2019), and recent social science scholarship on platform, platformization, assetization, and technoscientific and digital capitalism. The paper proceeds as follows: First, we review some of the theoretical discussion on platforms and platformization and their relevance for understanding AEC’ socio-digital transformation. We then summarize our material and methods before analyzing how various governmental strategies and the techno-economic reorganization through BIM shape this transformation. Subsequently, our case study on Autodesk’s techno-economic strategies to become the leading software provider shows how platformization branches out into architecture and construction. Finally, we discuss the implications of BIM’s political and techno-economic configuration as becoming simultaneously a de-facto standard in architecture and construction and a runway technology for the further datafication and automation of the sector.

We conclude that, the concurrent interlocking of techno-economic strategies pursued by software companies and some incumbent AEC stakeholders with policies implemented by governmental actors and professional associations is making BIM increasingly an ‘obligatory passage point’ (Callon, 1986) for AEC with implications for the sector and the built environment more broadly. Moreover, BIM operates not only as a runway technology for further digitalization and automation but also as an entry point for the assetization of construction-relevant data and the expansive logic of digital capitalism in the AEC sector.

Digital platform capitalism and architecture, engineering, and construction – an analytical perspective

The processes of platformization which we start seeing in architecture and construction form part of a more general reconfiguration of capitalism that needs to be understood against the backdrop of the global economic crisis in the late 2000s, a co-evolution of oligopolistic platform capitalism, the socio-digital transformation of various industry sectors, and increased financialization. Financialization – broadly meaning ‘the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies’ (Epstein, 2005, p. 3) – has reduced the relative independence of individual production sectors and triggered a transformation of individual firms and entire economies following the logics and imperatives of interest-bearing capital (Rahman and Thelen, 2019). Information and communication technologies (ICTs) played a critical part in these developments, instituting a vast landscape of secondary markets in ‘technoscientific capitalism’ (Birch, 2017). ICTs made it possible to link technoscience, software, data, products, firms, and investors globally and enact organizational networks that can be capitalized and turned into an asset (Birch, 2020), thereby fundamentally changing relations between producers and marketplaces by creating proprietary markets (Muniesa et al., 2017; Staab, 2020; Langley, 2021).

Digital platforms play a crucial part in this transformation. For our analysis, we build on social science scholarship on platform capitalism (Kenney and Zysman, 2016; Srnicek, 2016; Langley and Leyshon, 2017; Staab, 2020; Stark and Pais, 2020), technoscientific capitalism (Birch, 2017), platformization (Helmond, 2015; Poell et al., 2019; Van Dijck, 2021; Narayan, 2022), and assetization (Birch, 2020; Birch and Muniesa, 2020). This work shows how the mutually enabled digitization, datafication, and automation and the corporate and political driving actors driving these are reorganizing work relations, practices, products, and global capitalism.

Recent work on platforms and platformization has identified critical features that can shed light on our case. Platforms can be broadly understood as ‘multisided digital frameworks’ consisting of software, hardware, management, and the sociotechnical interactions taking place within them (Srnicek, 2016; Zysman and Kenney, 2018). In a more technical sense, and crucial in our case, platforms represent ‘a set of shared techniques, technologies, and interfaces that are open to a broad set of users who can build what they want on a stable substrate’ (Kenney and Zysman, 2016, p. 64). A digital platform offers different tools to users to create products, services, or market them (Srnicek, 2016, p. 43). In this sense, platform is a specific form of organizing social activity and social relations.

Generally, platformization describes the dynamic and contingent processes of platform diffusion in various sectors and social worlds (Helmond, 2015; Poell et al., 2019). It spotlights the interplay between digital data and technologies and the ‘permissive political-economic landscape’ (Rahman and Tehlen, 2019) that effects the reorganization of practices and social relations around the logics of platforms. Although, as such, platformization is not necessarily restricted to the corporate world and platforms that operate on a non-proprietary, cooperative basis do exist, the rise of the platform into a new, dominant mode of organization mainly took place in the corporate world. Accordingly, the concept of platformization essentially refers to proprietary platforms.

Platforms act as intermediaries between different types of users. This does not mean, however, that they grant power to users. Instead, by acting as intermediaries and permanently reorganizing their techno-economic fabric, platforms provide ‘regulatory structures and […] governance systems’ (Kenney and Zysman, 2016) to platform firms as well as ‘a source of non-bureaucratic control’ (Stark and Pais, 2020, p. 55) over the activities and the data generated within them. Platforms are widely associated with the US-based multinational Big Tech companies, i.e. Google/Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook/Meta, Apple, and Microsoft, and with the gig economy. However, the concept does not apply to these only. Platforms ‘can operate anywhere, wherever the digital interaction takes place’ (Srnicek, 2016, p. 44). Still, the Big Tech companies have defined the techno-economic developments and the terms and conditions of their use with ostensibly infrastructural effects, by acting as ‘meta-platforms’ (Staab, 2020) or ‘infrastructuralized platforms’ (Plantin et al., 2018). Although there may be conceptual overlaps between platform and infrastructures and the latter may be critical components of the former, the concept of platform is also distinct in that it refers to the interlinkage of a technical model, that allows for user interaction through interoperable and programmable platform components, and an economic model that allows for various forms of rent extraction.

Central to the technical expansion of platforms are APIs and software development kits (SDKs) (Bucher, 2013; Helmond, 2015; Mackenzie, 2019). They allow platforms to enroll third parties, integrate software, and automate data flow, and thereby structure dissemination and involvement. APIs are not neutral as scholarship reveals. Their hidden power resides in the relations within them. APIs produce constraints defined by the platform owner and determine forms and conditions of data. ‘APIs can be thought of as the “hooks” at the ends of software,’ asserts Narayan (2022, p. 925). Thus, Langley and Leyshon (2017) propose exploring the different platform providers’ approaches for granting access to their APIs. Platformization enabled by APIs requires attention as they not only represent tools for better interoperability but rather involve and ‘govern’ all possible parties including external stakeholders such as small firms or independent software developers (Bucher, 2013; Stark and Pais, 2020). In that sense, APIs give ‘use rights for otherwise idle assets’ (Langley and Leyshon, 2017, p. 19) to platform owners and create new revenue streams through lock-ins and network effects.

By binding numerous users that interact and generate data (Srnicek, 2016), platforms generate direct and indirect network effects that increase the likelihood of monopolization. An expansive winner-takes-all logic drives digital platforms since their value increases according to the number of people and entities accessing it in whatever way afforded (Kenney and Zysman, 2016; Rahman and Thelen, 2019). Platform owners strive to win over as many users and as different as possible and lock them into their system, for instance, by offering all-in-one solutions for seamless workflows and experiences that (may) prevent platform user exit. Consequently, switching becomes increasingly costly and risky as it is accompanied by a loss of contacts, data, and know-how.

The now dominating tech companies’ versions of digital platforms have managed to turn such practices of intermediation and interaction into processes of capitalization, actively curating and capitalizing connectivity (Srnicek, 2016; Langley and Leyshon, 2017). In many respects, digital platforms represent a specific category of assets, allowing their owners to generate revenue not so much from selling products but rather from the co-optation of foreign ‘assets, resources, and activities’ (Stark and Pais, 2020, p. 47), for which they then collect fees, licenses, or rents, and exploit the data produced and shared with them (Birch, 2020; Birch and Muniesa, 2020; Sadowski, 2020). Through contracts and terms of services developed out of software and website practices, platforms and platform firms ‘smuggle ownership claims’ (Sadowski, 2020, p. 64). Calling them ‘the landlords of digital capitalism’, Sadowski argues that their goal is to ‘make rent extraction as frictionless, automatic, and maximized as possible’ (ibid., p. 62). The potential for value creation, thus, sits in an ‘integrated platform ecosystem’ (Van Dijck et al., 2019) of different users, data, and technological products, perhaps distinguishable yet definitely inseparable.

Assuming a monopoly within a subfield of the Internet is not the final destination for platform expansion and platformization; the next step is to expand into areas of the residual economy. This process has begun to happen in the AEC sector and is largely afforded by BIM. Exploring platformization processes outside the widely studied social media context, we contend, reveals how platforms and the platform logic begin to alter traditional domains and their structures (ibid.), which may have significant material implications for key areas of society, particularly architecture, construction, and urban planning. In the following, we will examine how the logic of platformization emerges in this field of architecture and construction by foregrounding the role of software company Autodesk as a key driver and an early adopter. Here, we can see how one company not only grants access to a variety of AEC-outsiders, it also creates an ‘integrated platform ecosystem’ (ibid.), where parts are identifiable yet become difficult to separate (Van Dijck, 2021). As Sadowski stresses, ‘[i]ndependently, each device or platform is just an insignificant addition to a stable environment, but as a whole the swarm takes over, disrupts the equilibrium, and transforms the environment’ (2020, p. 52).

Material and methods

The analysis of the platformization of the built environment is based on the study of construction policy documents, position documents published by the software industry, and on expert interviews. The data collection and analysis are part of a qualitative research project studying the reconfiguration of actor relations, practices, stakeholder expectations, and organizational structures through advanced digital design and construction. First, we analyzed various public narratives on the digital transformation of the AEC sector and its sociotechnical imaginaries (Braun et al., 2022) drawing upon construction policy documents at the national and international level, industry reports, gray literature, position documents, and press material. We then became particularly aware of Autodesk’s dominant strategies and investigated these as a case study based on the analysis of trade and technical press articles. The documents by Autodesk we refer to are publicly accessible through the company’s website. The data collection includes company statements, press releases, investor communications and reports related to BIM software, platform development, and their techno-economic changes. Additionally, we supplemented these documents with material and notes from corporate videos and online events. An overview of the data can be seen in the Appendix, Table A1.

In parallel, we conducted a literature review of academic publications on the sociotechnical requirements for BIM adoption, such as data formats, standards, or interoperability, and the various challenges for the reorganization of architectural and construction practice (e.g. Neff et al., 2010; Laakso and Kiviniemi, 2012; Miettinen and Paavola, 2014; Aish and Bredella, 2017; Dainty et al., 2017; Zhang and Ashuri, 2018; Caetano and Leitão, 2020; Lee and Borrmann, 2020). The analysis of both, the documents and the research literature, served to contextualize the current sociotechnical developments and the techno-economic forces behind them, as well as to develop interview questions for guideline interviews. These twenty-six in-depth interviews with AEC professionals and experts in Germany focused on the digital transformation and reconfiguration of professional practice driven by the ongoing digitalization of the sector. These interviewees included representatives from architecture, civil engineering, timber construction, software vendors, professional associations, interest groups, and research. The interviews were primarily conducted in German over video conferencing tools, phone, and in-person between late 2019 and early 2021. We translated quotations from German documents and interviews into English for this article.

Building Information Modeling and the case of Autodesk as springboard for platformization in architecture, engineering, and construction

A look at the techno-economic dimensions of BIM shows an increased concentration of economic power among the IT/software industry and a few larger construction companies, rather than the proliferation of partnership and collaboration as the ‘BIM utopia’ narrates (Miettinen and Paavola, 2014). Although several software companies such as Bentley Systems, Nemetschek Group, Trimble, and research laboratories in the UK and the US have been involved in the nearly forty years of BIM’s development, leading global software provider Autodesk with its BIM products has significantly defined and popularized BIM (see Figure 1). Autodesk acquired the BIM software product Revit in 2002 and turned it into a ‘20 billion industry standard today in BIM’ (Hughes, 2019). Exact numbers are hard to obtain, but anecdotal evidence suggests that as much as 90% of US and 80% of UK firms working with BIM use Revit (Davis, 2020). A 2020 survey among mostly UK-based firms found that 50% of respondents using design software used Revit (NBS, 2020, p. 25). And, as an architect and structural engineer working for an international engineering office told us, ‘when people say BIM, three-quarters of them mean Revit’ (Computational Designer, November 24, 2020).

Figure 1. Historical chart of profit and non-profit BIM developments and companies. Source: Artem Boiko, 2022. (Reproduced with permission)

Today, Autodesk has assumed a nearly monopolistic position in the world of BIM software, a techno-economic development that has to be understood in light of the shift in the AEC sector towards a domain-specific digital platform capitalism. Following the analytical perspective of the scholarship on platformization, assetization, and technoscientific capitalism, we discerned four key techno-economic moves through which design software companies such as Autodesk strive to acquire a monopolistic position in the building sector:

1. affording interfaces (e.g. opening APIs) for third-party software integration or digital object libraries where manufacturers and subcontractors can offer their building components or services for sale, thus turning their software into a platform marketplace and fostering conventional standardized construction;

2. providing suitable and software environments for joint participation in project design and management and enabling ‘seamless’ collaborative construction via cloud computing;

3. generating and gathering design, construction, and collaboration data via software logs, APIs, and cloud connections that can be exploited by users but more importantly third parties like Amazon or Autodesk, and thus be turned into rent-generating assets;

4. offering data analysis and evaluation that can be fed back into design and planning and thus facilitate design automation in general.

Accordingly, we recognize that BIM’s political and techno-economic configuration as an emerging assemblage reinforces an oligopolistic platform structure. This entails new constraints and dependencies on actors and shapes the future of architecture and construction, especially because the IT industry is gaining definitional sovereignty over digital formats, interfaces, and standards. In the following section we discuss how this reconfiguration of power relations emerged from a conjunction of governmental endorsements in the form of policy strategies and standardization processes, and the techno-economic changes implemented into AEC technologies. Before doing so, we briefly explain BIM’s development and difference to other leading technologies in design and construction, as well as the primary organizations and actors involved.

BIM development and key actors

The use of digital technologies is part of architectural design and construction work since the early 1980s. Primary digital tools in AEC fall into four categories of application, namely computer-aided design (CAD), building information modeling (BIM), analysis, and simulation (Caetano and Leitão, 2020). Often the progression is depicted as one from two-dimensional (2D) CAD drawings to three-dimensional (3D) BIM models (Aish and Bredella, 2017). However, the developments of leading software applications in each category are interlinked, as a brief historical overview of the techno-economic development reveals (see also Figure 1).

In 1982, the US-based software company Autodesk started with the release of AutoCAD, a 2D CAD drawing tool and a direct translation of the 2D draft table on the screen, making it the leading application for the creation of 2D drawings in architecture, civil engineering, and manufacturing. The result was ‘flat drawings that contained no or little additional ‘intelligence’ or semantic information, that were unrelated to each other’ (Beetz et al., 2020, p. 513). The second generation of AutoCAD and similar tools were all enhanced with a 3D kernel to allow for 3D modeling (Caetano and Leitão, 2020), known as 3D CAD. Additionally, programming functionality was added to the software, thereby making the manipulation of geometry possible by applying parameters or using algorithms. For instance, AutoCAD included AutoLISP, a built-in programming environment and form of API that enabled third-party developers to extend their functionality, while allowing Autodesk to expand their software market impact.

BIM developed in parallel but remained largely on the margins compared to CAD as it followed a different approach to design. The BIM approach focuses on the creation of ‘information-rich construction elements as building blocks’ (Beetz et al., 2020, p. 513) as well as ‘data-sharing and communication across the organizational boundaries and in the intended collaboration encoded into the software’ (Neff et al., 2010, p. 558). BIM promises to coordinate integrated work within one 3D model for different project partners like architects, engineers, clients, and contractors in order to jointly design and manage (see Figure 2), to overcome frictions, delays, loss of data, smoothen the workflow, ensure transparency, and establish relations of partnership and collaboration (Paavola and Miettinen, 2019). Many actors are actively promoting this view, in particular, governments, consulting firms like McKinsey, Roland Berger or PricewaterhouseCoopers, software companies like Autodesk, Trimble, or Microsoft, but also international organizations like the World Economic Forum and domain-specific ones like Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) or buildingSMART (Braun et al., 2022).

Figure 2. Common depiction of BIM’s potential for inter- and intra-organizational collaboration as well as data exchange.

Whereas BIM initially represented a dreamy idea of an information-rich 3D model for multi-disciplinary collaboration in AEC, its extension to design tools, data management, standards, and regulation has tied up BIM and AEC with a market and manufacturing logic of control and reliability. Integration of building components and entire building modules into BIM databases promises to limit costs and reduce risk. Prefabrication and BIM demand that design decisions and planning are executed well before manufacturing begins, making them an ideal match for controlled industrial construction. The interplay of BIM data, and automation gradually creates a return-of-investment for particular stakeholders such as timber prefabricators that have relied on computer numerical control processes and semi-automated production for the last three decades. In other words, BIM shifts design and construction from 2D plans and speculative renderings to a spreadsheet aesthetic based on construction components and data, which promise to validate design decisions on a numerical ground ‘in boardroom discussions around economic policy and project viability’ (Ng, 2020).

BIM policies and standards

The diffusion of BIM has been strongly driven by governments for its promises to reduce risks, speed up project delivery, ensure transparency, and foster collaboration and partnership between clients, architects, engineers, construction firms, and public authorities. They set up policy frameworks and initiatives for enabling and partially mandating BIM’s implementation. Moreover, when it comes to the construction sector, governments act as major clients of construction projects, in particular large-scale projects, as regulators, and as promoters of national competitiveness. In their capacity as clients, they see BIM as an instrument to improve time and cost efficiency, quality, accuracy, and performance of buildings, and optimize project management and admission procedures. In their capacity as promoters of the national construction industry, they see it as a way to increase its productivity and competitiveness in global markets. As regulators, they can prescribe the use of BIM for various segments of the construction sector.

By now, many governments around the world have launched policies promoting, supporting or mandating the use of BIM. In 2017, a study sponsored by the Irish Construction IT Alliance reviewed the status of BIM in 27 countries, finding that over half of them had regulatory requirements for BIM or were planning to implement them, and two thirds had issued BIM guides or manuals for facilitating its application (Hore et al., 2017). Governments in many countries, such as Australia, Canada, China, Finland, France, Singapore, South Korea, Switzerland, the UK or the USA, have developed standards and guidelines for the certification and execution of BIM projects in order to facilitate its implementation (Lee and Borrmann, 2020).

Internationally, the UK and the USA have a defining sociocultural role in BIM’s technological and processual development with many of the leading R&D institutes, personalities, and software companies based in both countries (see Figure 1). BIM use in the US has been increasing for more than 20 years, with a national BIM standard in its third version (National Institute of Building Sciences, 2021). Already in 2011, the UK declared that all public sector construction projects require the use of BIM by 2016 (HM Government, 2013). In 2013, the government launched its industrial strategy Construction 2025, proclaiming the vision of 33 per cent lower construction and life cycle costs, 50 per cent faster delivery, 50 per cent lower greenhouse gas emissions and 50 per cent increase of exports in UK construction by 2025 through the implementation of BIM (ibid., p. 5).

On a supra-national level, the EU encouraged its member states to require the use of BIM for public works contracts and design contests by mid-2016 and established the EU BIM Task Group to create a common network for using BIM. The policy objectives clearly are greater productivity, sector growth, faster production, better value for public money, and ‘an open, competitive and world-leading digital single market for construction’ (EU BIM Task Group, 2017, p. 2). Pushed by these government requirements, BIM tends to become an obligatory passage point (Callon, 1986) for the production of the built environment, forcing actors to adopt its rationalities as their common interest, pushing and enabling particular ways of practicing construction, while sorting out others.

On a global level, the Global BIM Network was established in 2021 to advance the knowledge and capacity of national policies and programs. Within this alliance of public- and private-sector representatives and multi-lateral organizations, Autodesk assumes a central role making BIM one of the company’s core policy priorities. Often, as the Global BIM Network suggests, an industry-led initiative of larger design and construction firms and software producers spearheads these policies. In nearly all, buildingSMART international or one of its regional chapters were involved (Hore et al., 2017).

BuildingSMART International is an alliance of companies, government bodies and institutions founded in 1995 that promotes the use of open – not to be confused with non-proprietary – sharable building information through developing and maintaining the Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) schema of standard specifications. IFC defines a major, global, open standard for data exchange in the construction industry and thus a major basis for interoperability between different BIM and CAD software. Autodesk has been an original founder of buildingSMART and is now member of its Strategic Advisory Council, together with other major BIM/CAD software providers Trimble and Nemetschek Group, global AEC firm Arup, multinational corporation Siemens, and China Railway BIM Alliance and China Communications Construction Company (buildingSMART, 2020).

However, one of the most critical impediments of BIM diffusion considered by stakeholders is exactly a lack of uniform standards for data and model exchange. While the demand for consistent data and model standards in the AEC sector has existed since introducing the first CAD applications and later BIM, generally the standardization process has not been straightforward, as studies reveal (Björk and Laakso, 2010; Laakso and Kiviniemi, 2012). De-facto and thereby corporate standards emerge through the competition of multiple technology options on the market and their widespread user adoption, such as is the case for Autodesk’s native CAD file format DWG (Björk and Laakso, 2010). Unlike CAD standards, which are considered to be simpler and have required little effort and time to implement, the case of BIM and IFC standardization is complex due to the vast number of elements in 3D building models requiring specification and the information exchange between many different parties. Hence, it has led to the longest standardization process (Laakso and Kiviniemi, 2012), still unfolding.

The IFC standardization is entangled closely with the technical development of BIM software, a process that is also a social one: ‘the standard has been influencing the development of the technology itself; distinguishing the standardisation efforts from the general development and testing work of the software tools is very difficult’ (Björk and Laakso, 2010, p. 400). However, the first-hand involvement of software providers in IFC standardization complicates its ambition for being considered an open standard and interface. In reality, developing and implementing the IFC standard relies on the business strategies of a few software companies and R&D programs (ibid., p. 405). Indeed, as Kelty (2008) has retraced in his ethnography of free software, the concept of openness and open systems in software, hardware, and IT standards is unspecific by design and shaped by economic interests.

Whether the IFC will succeed as the BIM standard after more than twenty years of development and committee bargaining is perhaps secondary. Its immediate impact on software development and interoperability, the definition of BIM workflows and data formats, and shaping the policies of many governments, supra-national initiatives, and industry alliances who have proven eager to make BIM a standard demonstrates its significance. These strategies and standardization processes have a techno-economic dimension that merits closer inspection if we want to understand the profound reconfiguration of actor and power relations in the AEC world, as the following section illustrates.

Techno-economic strategies: subscription models, clouds, platforms

Recent technological developments such as cloud computing, big data, machine learning, and their corporate application profoundly define BIM’s platformization. By now, BIM software vendors are incrementally converting their products towards platform-based services by changing the delivery and fee models for their products, opening up APIs, introducing cloud services, and converging all into connected ‘meta-platforms’.

Cloud-based computing and higher bandwidth enables software companies to switch software distribution from disk storage to file downloads from company websites, depending upon Amazon Web Services and similar infrastructure-as- service providers (Narayan, 2022). Unlike more recent web-based software services, the older licensing and ownership model of design software initially remained the same as with disk storage. Users paid once to obtain the latest version, which then belonged to them on theory indefinitely. They could decide if they want to pay more for updates (and software maintenance) or wait until the next software version release. The first step in changing the delivery and ownership model came through the release of different design and construction software products for free to students, educators, and academic institutions worldwide. Often considered a removal of the barrier of expensive technology access for design work and an opportunity to learn software along with the core design and construction curriculum, the for-free implementation in post-secondary education creates lock-in effects very early on. This practice of ‘cross-subsidization’ of one service through another is common for platforms: ‘one arm of the firm reduces the price of a service or good (or even providing it for free), but another arm raises prices in order to make for these losses’ (Srnicek, 2016, p. 46).

In the case of Autodesk, the company announced in 2015 a year-long transition to subscription-based licenses affecting all products which gave (paying) customers two options: first, customers with perpetual licenses could continue using them but without getting technical support; and second, customers registering an additional maintenance subscription for a fee would receive support if needed. Software companies claim that the benefits for users from this transition are greater than before, including the usual promises of continuous software development, free updates and maintenance, better customer service, and only paying for the necessary time and software package. However, shifting from a purchase model to a subscription model meant that users pay a license for a particular time rather than making a one-time purchase, which could become a substantial investment for practitioners and organizations. The cost of using Revit and other AEC software can amount between to two and six percent of a firm’s annual revenue (Mihaly, 2020). Licensed software thus operates as an asset that yields a continuous economic rent for its owner and provider (Birch, 2020).

The benefits of a subscription model, however, seem smaller to architects than to engineers and construction companies, as an open letter to Autodesk’s CEO signed by of the world’s leading architectural firms suggests (Davis, 2020). The architects complain about Revit’s annually increasing subscription fees, lack of helpful software updates for design work, and a reorientation towards the construction market. According to a RIBA survey cited in this open letter, ‘[i]n the period between 2015 and 2019 most practices […] had at least 5 different license models in play, moving from individual product licenses, to suites, through to collections and now, in 2020 to individual user licenses’, and the costs for one Revit license had gone up by 70% (Letters to Autodesk, 2020).

Hypothetically, the costs grew as a result of the announced one-year transition from perpetual ownership to subscriptions that brought confusion among customers: ‘Perpetual, subscription, Suites, Collections, single user, network, named, maintenance, Token Flex, and crossgrades [i.e. different license names and versions]. The individual circumstances of any Autodesk customer will be a licensing voyage in its own right, together with Autodesk’s policies in seemingly never-ending evolution’ (Day, 2020). This ‘licensing voyage’ is what Stark and Pais (2020) call a non-bureaucratic control by the platform (owner) through a production of uncertainty for the users. In addition, a fear of potential reprisals of license infringement detected with Autodesk’s notorious software audits and continuously enforced with end-user license agreements has pressured customers to accept this license mess and the additional costs incurred with it (Day, 2020), thereby binding them to this pre-platform condition.

At the same time, Revit is becoming a de-facto standard demanded in many countries to bid and participate in projects may prevent many users from changing to another BIM software. As a software vendor representative in Germany explained,

Of course, it is also market-driven. That means that more and more projects are being done internationally with Revit. And when they are working on larger projects, they inevitably come across Revit projects. And this is also forcing many offices to move. And in the international development in construction, especially concerning BIM, Autodesk is simply leading the way. […] There’s nothing else for you to do, and you have to give in. (Software salesperson, 24 November 2020)

Such techno-economic pressures and lock-ins can also increase the interoperability of software products between the heterogeneous and competing IT industries. In a platform capitalist manner, the leading AEC software providers have been working to connect their products to popular project management applications. This means, for example, that when using Autodesk’s software development platform Forge and a connection to Microsoft Power Automate, data exchange is ensured between Revit and various Microsoft applications, including their popular email program, word processor, and spreadsheet. In parallel, Autodesk and Trimble, who provided the complementary software for construction, have signed a joint agreement to increase their products’ interoperability. The software providers enable interoperability by keeping their APIs open for others to develop software add-ons and plugins, as a computational designer illustrates:

Yes, we are forced to use Autodesk products as well. However, we do not work with it. We work partly with it by creating interfaces. […] we have developed an interface so that we can completely model things in Rhino [3D design software] […]. And then we programmed an interface so that the data is automatically sent to […] Revit. (Computational Designer 4, November 24, 2020)

As this quote suggests, even if architects or engineers work with different software solutions and software providers attempt to support interoperability through opening APIs, Autodesk’s BIM software still remains an obligatory passage point.

The need to integrate different actors and organizations across time and space into the BIM process and to ensure data, model, and third-party software interoperability necessitates access and coordination through a cloud system (Beetz et al., 2020). While APIs have paved the way for interoperability between different systems and remain an important software management technique (Bucher, 2013), AEC software providers have started administering the interoperability of third-party software and plugins similarly to Amazon Web Services. They gradually roll out and implement a cloud-based platform infrastructure upon which the integration across projects, organizations, and software applications gets set up, while at the same time offering a tool for data-driven decision-making based upon AI-based analytics. In many ways, this infrastructuring effort allows for an extensive data accumulation beyond the one-on-one communication of two software applications. In the case of Autodesk, a combination of the Forge developer platform with their so-called Construction Cloud connects a variety of data on user identifiers, licenses, device setup, application sessions and commands with internal and third-party analytics tools such as Google Analytics. As a study shows (Zhang and Ashuri, 2018), mining design logs of Revit’s usage can provide data and insights about team productivity and interactions in intra- or inter-organizational collaboration. It also opens up a gate towards user surveillance.

Ultimately, the ongoing transition of software providers towards becoming pervasive data accumulation machines through the integration of different services and products manifests in sector-unifying and cloud-based platforms. Announced in 2015, Forge was launched at first as a solely software engineering platform for company-external IT developers and tech-savvy actors in the AEC sector to build new cloud-based technologies. Autodesk, similar to the Big Tech conglomerates, also deployed Forge as a springboard for startups seeking venture capital and developing novel tech solutions. For Autodesk, the revenue from these startups comes often from the data generated on their platform. The presence of these types of software development platforms in the background of daily AEC business organized around BIM and multiple office applications, and the higher demand for interoperability reinforces the platformization process. This trend has become evident with the announcement of Forge’s convergence with BIM technologies and processes as well as any building-related data at Autodesk’s annual conference. The Forge platform’s even greater presence in the promotional narrative, as our discourse analysis of corporate documents hints, reveals its long-term value prospects for the software corporation and their investors through the datafication of building processes afforded by the platformization of AEC. At the 2021 conference keynote, Autodesk’s CEO overtly proclaimed: ‘The Autodesk Forge platform lets developers access design and engineering data in the cloud. These developers use forms to connect processes, automate workflows and unlock valuable insights. And just as Forge lets developers create more value, it does the same for Autodesk’ (Autodesk, 2021).

Beyond data access, Forge further pushes a transactional fee model, thus making customers pay on top of their subscription for any additional services such as a one-time rendering or structural analysis. With these combined cloud-API solutions, the software industry may ultimately bridge companies, processes, and data, decreasing the chances for actors to employ non-proprietary software applications or keep working in their accustomed software environments. Even if they do so, as the analysis shows, they will still become looped in the ‘BIM platform passage point’ and bestow their data.

Emerging implications of AEC’s platformization

The platform’s expansive logic is beginning to transform the industry, which is likely to have some foreseeable impact. Platformization in design and construction may result in market concentration in favor of particular players, such as general contractors (i.e. large all-in-one construction companies encompassing multiple services from design to construction). The entrance of new players such as Big Tech companies like Google/Alphabet with their Sidewalk Labs indicates a change in AEC actor constellations. The growing convergence of cloud-based platform solutions supplemented with the generation of construction data and information might have further implications not only for AEC actors and their creations, but rather for society and its built environment at the same time.

In architectural design, we see that one software provider virtually monopolized BIM and can determine increasingly what architects can and cannot do, among which products and design options they can choose, and at what costs. The highly monopolized software development with its associated object libraries favors some design solutions and makes others improbable. In construction, digital construction technology startups such as the now bankrupt and much publicized Katerra or Factory_OS, aided by venture capital from Google, Autodesk, and SoftBank among others, instantly turned into global players by using the digitally-enabled technology platforms for semi-automated off-site mass production of building components or even whole buildings. BIM used together with such construction platforms allows their users to deliver more in less time, perhaps at the expense of architectural uniqueness. Platform-based design and construction approaches allow for variation, individualization, and customization – albeit within a set range of options. These options, however, must be interrogated against the backdrop of platform capitalism implications.

The ongoing costs of BIM products and cloud licenses and the underlying rationalities of cost–benefit-maximization form the entrance fee for architectural firms to bid for major public contracts. They determine to a considerable extent who can access this market and who cannot. As the required upfront investments – in equipment, software, training – are high, big construction firms are privileged at the SMEs’ expense as a case study on small construction firms in the UK reaffirms (Dainty et al., 2017). Besides, suppose an architect, engineer, or constructor ties their software license to a particular project, they might be unable to access the project’s data and re-use it for further work depending on the end-user license agreement – often individually negotiated, further aggravated depending on their geographical location and the software providers’ server locations. With partially decentralized cloud computing and platforms, access to prior data and models now resides with the platform owner. In a first-mover-takes-it-all game, this will mean the end for many.

In general, there is reason to assume that these mechanisms will have consequences for what is being built (Braun et al., 2022). Economically, such heavy investments make most sense either in the segment of big complex projects that could not be built without sophisticated technology or in the segment of serial solutions, where economic returns can be generated through scaling (Sundermeier and Beidersandwisch, 2019; Braun et al., 2022). One effect of the digital transformation, therefore, might be the concentration of construction projects within these two segments of serial, standardized mass products on the one hand and complex high-end projects for potential clients on the other, with little incentives to build aesthetically attractive, individualized, high-quality buildings at moderate costs. Datafication, platformization, and the recent incorporation of machine learning-algorithms and artificial intelligence into AEC technologies assume different effects for what is being built in the future. Design automation tools such as Spacemaker and cloud-based platforms provide the means to calculate design options and make predictions based on BIM data from previous building designs. Buildings based on data from previous designs, thus, may reproduce the known and stereotyped, not questioning its social failures and problems.

Looking at the techno-economic and political conditions for AEC’s platformization through BIM, as detailed in Autodesk’s case, calls not only for the building industry and its actors but also for policymakers and society to set different policies that curtail the dominance of a few software companies and platform capitalism, before too long. For instance, the European Construction Industry Federation requests in a position paper to the European Commission more action towards the market entry of non-EU-based AEC clouds and platforms (FIEC, 2020). As our case reveals, the BIM market and the platformization of AEC are already split among a few dominant players and even those based in the EU have strong ties to transnational investment funds (see Figure 1). Thus, the sector requires stronger antitrust regulations by governments and professional associations that are built around consumer protection (Stark and Pais, 2020).

Otherwise, in the future, to BIM or not to BIM might no longer be a question for architects, engineers, and construction workers to ask themselves, but under what circumstances and for whose gain. For some time, openBIM – describing the IFC file sharing format for interoperability between different BIM software and data – represented a viable alternative for SMEs and those with different software preferences beyond the proprietary systems if they wanted to partake in design and construction work. Currently, there are a few existing alternatives grounded in the idea of collective action against the platform impact on this sector and the built environment. One involves the warning to Autodesk by a group of leading architectural firms to unionize in order to regain control over their tools. Yet, as the company gradually shifts towards engineers and construction companies as their core customers, while architects depend on them to build their designs, the solution may remain a technological one, that is integrating architects and their preferred tools into a cloud environment. Other alternatives involve using open-source BIM applications like BlenderBIM, an add-on to the community-developed 3D modeling tool Blender, the open-source BIM data platform Speckle, software development kits like Open Design Alliance, or the open-source software libraries ifcOpenShell. However, until now, they remain a feasible option for a small group of initiates in academia and AEC experts.

Still, the recent steps towards BIM platformization with software providers opening up their API for third-parties, the persistent software acquisitions and integrations, and ultimately the convergence into cloud-based platforms indicate a fuzziness of openness. Indeed, with the potential for platform providers to monetize from the accumulated and heterogeneous building data, individual software preferences and their costs might no longer hamper digital transformation. Instead, AEC practitioners become pulled even more into a platform maelstrom that enables interoperability of AEC applications for the sake of comfort and productivity.

Conclusion

This article highlighted how recent undertakings in the digital transformation of architecture, engineering, and construction through Building Information Modeling (BIM) might reinforce the power of global software giants and all-in-one construction companies. BIM aims to produce data- and information-rich three-dimensional models of buildings that coordinate the interaction of heterogeneous actors and organizations throughout a building’s design, construction, and operation in the long run. While historically, the essence of BIM has been to use ‘software to develop a highly detailed 3-D model of the building before it is built’ (Cardoso Llach, 2019, p. 452), we suggested that with BIM as a backbone, multinational software companies like Autodesk drive the platformization of architecture and construction, with the consequence of defining large parts of the sector’s work and philosophy. This tendency is not least enabled by the intertwining of governmental policy strategies with the techno-economic platform logic of subscription models, open application programming interfaces (APIs), and cloud-enabled collaboration for better data and software interoperability.

Drawing on core insights from the literatures on platform capitalism, platformization, and assetization, we have demonstrated how the expansive logic of digital capitalism is now taking hold in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector. As our reconstruction of policy strategies and the concurrent techno-economic developments in software and IT through the analyzed documents and expert interviews revealed, BIM facilitates making the sector and the built environment ‘platform-ready’ (Helmond, 2015). As research on platforms has emphasized, platforms represent ‘multisided digital frameworks’ to connect data, technologies, users, and services as well as to structure them thereby (Srnicek, 2016; Plantin et al., 2018; Zysman and Kenney, 2018; Staab, 2020). BIM affords this through the specific software products used by actors, the requirement for data and software interoperability that opens up APIs to third parties and allows data and building models’ continuous exchange, and hence the intermediation between different types of users.

As software providers, in our case demonstrated with Autodesk, continue to reorganize the license models and distribution of their products, we showed how this leads to uncertainty among users and to what other scholars have argued is a source of non-bureaucratic control through the platform environment (Rahman and Thelen, 2019; Stark and Pais, 2020). This de-facto standardization of BIM as a platform then ties closely together the technical modalities for user interaction and data with an economic model based on rent extraction (Birch and Muniesa, 2020; Sadowski, 2020). The transition of BIM from user-owned software located on their devices to a cloud-based platform connecting heterogeneous actors, activities, and resources allows for the co-optation of previously unpossessed and inaccessible data by platform providers. This assetization of construction-relevant data is gaining momentum and opening up new opportunities for platform operators to generate rents, for example, from the user logs generated in the BIM models hosted on cloud software or by accessing distinctive computational services such as simulation of a building’s performance that are typically delegated to engineers (see Kropp et al., 2022).

However, treating platforms just as tools for the digital transformation of AEC risks to obscure what platformization can provoke for the future of AEC and the built environment. Instead, focusing on the processes of platformization—how an ‘integrated platform ecosystem’ (Van Dijck et al., 2019) of nearly inseparable but distinguishable platform users, data, and technologies emerges and changes practices, structures, and actor relations—reveals the sociotechnical, political, and economic arrangements and powers behind that. Here, the case of Autodesk shows what happens when a traditional industry sector is penetrated by the logic of platform capitalism (Srnicek, 2016; Van Dijck et al., 2019). Our research also contributes to calls for more studies on platformization as such processes seep into established industries and knowledge domains (Van Dijck et al., 2019; Hind et al., 2022). The fact that BIM tends to become an obligatory passage point gives tremendous power to individual software companies to define what construction data should look like, which are to be collected and which not, how it can be used and reused, and subsequently, what is ultimately being built based on the software tools in use.

The platformization of AEC and the built environment tells us that it would be naïve to assess the risks, benefits, potentials, and implications of the digital transformation through platforms, clouds, algorithms, and data without taking the techno-economic logic and the favorable political landscape into account. Today, Autodesk has not only turned Revit into the prime BIM-based data source and locked in most BIM users worldwide, it is on the way of becoming a ‘meta-platform’ (Staab, 2020) through its cloud infrastructure. By cross-subsidizing their cloud platforms with revenue generated from software licenses, as we have shown, software providers have empowered the platformization strategy. Presumably, the emerging market for such cloud solutions will exceed the distribution of the design software in the long run. Power and control, we argue, are not located in the relation between designers and their tools anymore, if they ever were, but rather moved into the structure and operations of proprietary design software and (cloud) platforms.

The future of digital architecture and construction will not be determined in conflicts about tools but rather through the operations of infrastructures, standards, platforms, and their modes of dissemination. Currently, the political and techno-economic dynamics behind the digital transformation of the AEC sector and its logics of platformization, datafication, and assetization are strikingly absent from debates about digital architecture and construction and about Big Tech’s position in that. In this respect, mobilizing concepts from critical data studies and the political economy of software, such as ‘data imperative’ (Fourcade and Healy, 2016) and ‘infrastructuralized platforms’ (Plantin et al., 2018) helps explain better the stratifying effects that governmentally-supported and tech-driven platformization processes might have on this sector. The digital architecture and construction field also receives little attention as yet in science and technology studies. However, at stake are the questions of who will own the future of building and what that means for society at large. Thus, a critical debate is urgently needed.

Acknowledgement

We thank the journal editors and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We also like to thank Thomas Wortmann for comments on earlier versions of this paper and our student assistants for supporting this research.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2120/1–390831618.

Notes on contributors

Yana Boeva

Yana Boeva is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Institute for Social Sciences and the Cluster of Excellence Integrative Computational Design and Construction for Architecture (IntCDC) at the University of Stuttgart, Germany.

Kathrin Braun

Kathrin Braun is research coordinator at the Center for Interdisciplinary Risk and Innovations Studies (ZIRIUS) at the University of Stuttgart, Germany. She received her PhD and Habilitation in political science from the University of Hanover, Germany. Her main research areas are science and technology politics and critical biopolitics studies.

Cordula Kropp

Cordula Kropp holds the Chair of Sociology of Technology, Risk and Environment at the Institute for Social Sciences and is the director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Risk and Innovation Research at the University of Stuttgart (ZIRIUS). She is a member of the board of directors at the Cluster of Excellence Integrative Computational Design and Construction for Architecture (IntCDC).

Appendix

Table A1. Analysed Autodesk documents.

Document Title	Document Type	Publication Date	Source (URL)	Accessed
Autodesk Charts the Future of Building Information Modeling	Press release	2013	https://adsknews.autodesk.com/pressrelease/autodesk-charts-the-future-of-building-information-modeling	9-Aug-2021
Autodesk Makes Design Software Free to Schools Worldwide	Investor news	2014	https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-details/autodesk-makes-design-software-free-schools-worldwide	9-Aug-2021
Autodesk Details Subscription Transition for New Software Licenses	Investor news	2015	https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-details/autodesk-details-subscription-transition-new-software-licenses	9-Aug-2021
Autodesk and Trimble Sign Agreement to Increase Interoperability	Press release	2016	https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160614005404/en/	9-Aug-2021
Autodesk Announces New Developer Offerings and Investments to Fuel Forge Platform	Investor news	2016	https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-details/autodesk-announces-new-developer-offerings-and-investments-fuel	9-Aug-2021
Autodesk Bets Big on Forge Platform to Make Anything	Investor news	2016	https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-details/autodesk-bets-big-forge-platform-make-anything	9-Aug-2021
Autodesk Ushers in New Era of Connected Construction with Autodesk Construction Cloud	Press release	2019	https://adsknews.autodesk.com/pressrelease/autodesk-ushers-in-new-era-of-connected-construction-with-autodesk-construction-cloud	9-Aug-2021
Factory_OS Receives Strategic Investments from Autodesk, Citi to Help Address Affordable Housing Crisis in Bay Area and Beyond	Investor news	2019	https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-details/factoryos-receives-strategic-investments-autodesk-citi-help	9-Aug-2021
Autodesk Completes Acquisition of Spacemaker, Provider of AI and Generative Design-enabled Urban Design Platform	Investor news	2020	https://investors.autodesk.com/news-releases/news-release-details/autodesk-completes-acquisition-spacemaker-provider-ai-and	6 June 2021
Autodesk Announces Powerful New Model Coordination Workflow for BIM and VDC Managers	Press release	2020	https://adsknews.autodesk.com/pressrelease/autodesk-announces-powerful-new-model-coordination-workflow-for-bim-and-vdc-managers	9-Aug-2021
Autodesk to Acquire AI-Powered Construction Software Provider Pype	Press release	2020	https://constructionblog.autodesk.com/autodesk-acquires-pype/	6-Dec-2021
Fiscal Year 2021: Annual Report – Notice of annual meeting and proxy statement	Reports	2021	https://investors.autodesk.com/static-files/f0ab7605-383c-4d23-9bcf-abb168d0489d	9-Aug-2021
Autodesk Construction Cloud Global Focus Expands with Workflows that Support ISO 19650	Press release	2021	https://constructionblog.autodesk.com/autodesk-construction-support-iso-19650/	9-Aug-2021
A better world designed and made for all: FY21 Impact Report	Reports	2021	https://damassets.autodesk.net/content/dam/autodesk/www/sustainability/docs/pdf/autodesk-fy2021-impact-report.pdf	9-Aug-2021
New Construction Management Solution – Autodesk Build – Now Available Worldwide	Press release	2021	https://adsknews.autodesk.com/pressrelease/new-construction-management-solution-autodesk-build-now-available-worldwide	9-Aug-2021
Governments Can Help Fix Construction Woes With Global BIM	Corporate blog	2021	https://redshift.autodesk.com/global-bim/	13-Aug-2021
Forge Keynote, Autodesk University 2021, 7 October 2021	Video	2021	https://events-platform.autodesk.com/event/autodesk-university-2021/planning/UGxhbm5pbmdfNjY5OTI0	6-Dec-2021
Autodesk University Keynote: General Session, Part 1	Video	2021	https://events-platform.autodesk.com/event/autodesk-university-2021/planning/UGxhbm5pbmdfNjY5OTMx	6-Dec-2021
Autodesk Analytics Program	Website (general information)	n/d	https://www.autodesk.com/company/autodesk-analytics	9-Aug-2021
Government Affairs and Public Policy	Website (general information)	n/d	https://www.autodesk.com/company/government-affairs	9-Aug-2021