The Rise and Fall of Autodesk Architectural Studio

Only a little over a year ago, I reviewed version 3 of Autodesk Architectural Studio in Cadence magazine. This is what I said in my introduction to the product:

There haven't traditionally been many software applications for architectural design with the "Wow!" factor. After decades of a steady diet of efficient but boring 2D drafting programs came 3D modeling programs—interesting and fun, but also complex and time-consuming to master. After becoming reconciled to their fate, imagine the surprise of architects when suddenly a number of applications were introduced that actually made them sit up and say "Wow!" Autodesk Architectural Studio is one such application. It has had to, however, share this glory with tools such as SketchUp and Piranesi. Otherwise, it would have been the undisputed prima donna in the field of conceptual architectural design.

Sadly, the architectural community will soon be losing this "cool tool" for conceptual design. Autodesk recently announced its decision to discontinue the development and sales of Autodesk Architectural Studio software:

"As of September 15, 2004, Architectural Studio will no longer be available for purchase from Autodesk nor for download from the Autodesk Subscription Center. Current Architectural Studio customers can continue to use the software for as long as they like."

This issue of the AECbytes newsletter provides a brief overview and history of the product and analyzes why the product did not become a commercial success. It also presents Autodesk's perspective on the issue and elaborates upon the reasons that forced the company to make the decision to drop the product from its solutions lineup for the building industry.

Product Overview and History

Autodesk Architectural Studio digitally simulated a physical design desktop where you could sketch, draw in 2D, and model in 3D, in reference to site photographs, other images, CAD drawings, and any other content needed for interactive conceptual design. Content was created in translucent document windows that simulated trace paper, allowing you to place one document over another and sketch over it, as you would in real life. All drawing entities, even freehand ones, were vector objects that could be edited after creation. It had a good range of 3D tools that allowed easy creation of massing models, with the ability to simultaneously create multiple workplanes, oriented anywhere in space, and model objects on them. It also included built-in intranet collaboration abilities that allow several participants in a firm to collaborate on a design. The application was a pleasure not only to use but also to see—it sported a clean, innovative, and stylish interface with tools replicating real-world design aids that required little or no learning to use. It worked best with a pen-based input device.

Product research at Autodesk on Architectural Studio began in 1999 as Project Nora, a forward-looking exploration of digital design tools and how they might relate to the emerging technologies of the Internet and pen-tablet computing. Developed under the codename StudioDesk, the product was formally unveiled at the AIA 2001 Convention and Expo as Autodesk Architectural Studio, where it occupied center stage at the Autodesk booth (see my report on the show in Cadence AEC Tech News #51). With an interface especially designed to appeal to architects, the product was a major crowd-puller. The highlight of Autodesk's presentation at this show was a sketch created in Architectural Studio by the renowned architect, Micheal Graves, who was also the recipient of the AIA Gold Medal that year. In short, you could say that Autodesk Architectural Studio definitely arrived on the architectural scene with a bang.

On my visit to the AIA 2002 Convention and Expo the following year, I saw Release 2 of Architectural Studio, featuring several usability enhancements. While the product was still quite a crowd-puller, the fervor around it had subsided and I predicted that the product wouldn't really take off until pen-based computing had become commonplace, considering its reliance on pen-based input (see Cadence AEC Tech News #75). A few months prior to the show, Autodesk had acquired Revit, and the focus at the Expo was undeniably on Revit's first public appearance under the Autodesk banner (see Cadence AEC Tech News #76).

The year 2003 saw the release of version 3 of Architectural Studio, which I had the opportunity to review in Cadence magazine. After that, there were no further releases and an inkling of the eventual fate of the product can be had in hindsight from the fact that Architectural Studio was not even on display at the AIA 2004 Convention and Expo (see AECbytes Newsletter #10 on the show).

Why Architectural Studio Didn't Make It

In my review of Autodesk Architectural Studio 3, I pointed out that despite its brilliance, it did have its limitations. Some of these were minor and related to specific features. One major limitation, as I mentioned earlier, was its perceived reliance on pen-based input, which tied its success to that of pen-based computing in general. While Tablet PCs are becoming more common, they are still a very small minority in proportion to the use of traditional desktop and laptop computers. So adoption of an application based on this platform was going to be slow.

As a tool for conceptual building design, I found that the biggest limitation of Architectural Studio was the lack of "building intelligence" in its entities. Thus, a sketch plan or massing model done in Studio could not be automatically translated into properly dimensioned building entities in Revit or Architectural Desktop, which would have allowed for a better integrated workflow. For the same reason, the design concepts developed in Studio could also not be subjected to numerical analysis and evaluation for aspects such as energy, cost, circulation, emergency evacuation, and so on, which are critical to perform at the conceptual design stage. In that respect, Studio simply replicated paper-based conceptual design processes and did not provide a smarter and better way to design. It was a "nice to have" application, but not a "mission-critical" one.

I was looking forward to seeing future versions of Architectural Studio that would address the limitations I had pointed out in my review. So the news of Autodesk's decision to discontinue the product came as quite a shock. Why would Autodesk pull the plug on such a promising and innovative application, the likes of which are in short supply in our industry? I spoke with Phil Bernstein, VP of Autodesk's Building Solutions Division, to find out more about what had prompted Autodesk to make this decision. He confirmed my critique that Studio had failed to make it to the "mission critical" list of architectural applications. It was incredibly cool, it demo-ed very well, everyone loved it, but very few people were actually buying it. Ultimately, it was simply a matter of business economics—the many years of development effort into the product hadn't paid off in sales, which did not justify developing, selling, and supporting the product any further. The decision had nothing to do with the unabated popularity and success of the 3D modeling program, SketchUp (see my recent review of SketchUp 4.0), which Autodesk sees as an application that solves a completely different problem. However, Studio is certainly a victim of pen-based computing not taking off as Autodesk anticipated: they found that customers didn't want to spend resources on additional hardware to be able to use one piece of software, particularly one that hadn't proved itself mission-critical.

So is this the end of Autodesk Architectural Studio? Autodesk says that the decision to discontinue it is firm, so there is little likelihood of it making a comeback at some point in the future. However, fans of the application may be heartened to know that many of the ideas and concepts behind the application will survive and make their way into other Autodesk products. Some of the interface ideas from Architectural Studio, such as tool palette design, tool organization, transparency, and so on, have already been incorporated into AutoCAD and ADT, starting from version 2004. Many others have been incorporated into DWF Composer, Autodesk's brand new product for reviewing, marking up, and revising DWF files (see my review of DWF Composer). Interestingly, the development of DWF Composer at Autodesk is spearheaded by the same architect who led the development of Architectural Studio, so we can expect to see a lot more of Studio in DWF Composer as it evolves. Autodesk also plans to eventually incorporate some conceptual design tool ideas from Studio into its core building design applications, Revit and ADT, so that the range of these applications can extend into conceptual design as well.

For now, however, it is the end of Autodesk Architectural Studio as we know it. It is a shame that such an innovative application could not make it in the AEC industry. The lesson for software vendors here is that it is not sufficient to simply develop a cool application—it really needs to solve a critical problem as well. Otherwise, not even a market leader like Autodesk can pull it off.

About the Author

Lachmi Khemlani is founder and editor of AECbytes. She has a Ph.D. in Architecture from UC Berkeley, specializing in intelligent building modeling, and consults and writes on AEC technology. She can be reached at lachmi@aecbytes.com.

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