Simon Irgens
Forma Site Design, available in the AEC Collection or as a standalone subscription, offers powerful AI-powered tools for architects and designers in pre-design and schematic design phases.
In May 2025, the Forma Community team invited MVRDV to the Forma HQ in Oslo, Norway for an intensive workshop. We spent three days with eight architects from MVRDV, learning, testing, and getting a glimpse into the future. After weeks of planning, it was great to finally meet the whole team to Oslo.
The first day focused on learning Forma Site Design from A to Z. Clément Lemaire, architect at Forma, covered all the design functionality, while Maxime Briens and Catharina Lundby, both product managers, led deep dives into area statistics and environmental analyses. Having a full day of training gave us the time to discuss the technology behind Forma’s analyses and how we apply AI and machine learning to support an iterative, outcome-based design workflow. We ended the day with an architecture tour of MVRDV’s Barcode project and their characteristic pixelated DNB Building from 2009.
Design competition: more than learning
Day two was my personal highlight – the design competition. Using a design competition as a format for learning and testing Forma Site Design was an experiment we designed together. Learning is simply more fun when there’s something at stake. We started the day with a refreshing (icy!) swim in the Oslo fjord, followed by coffee and a presentation of the competition brief. Then we walked together to the site – a transit hub with ground floor retail and upper floor offices, hidden in a forgotten corner of Central Oslo. The team definitely saw a lot of potential to revive these rather dreary spaces!
The design brief called for a mixed-use development with a total GFA of 120,000 m² composed of: housing 40% (48,000 m²), offices 30% (36,000 m²), bus terminal/mobility hub 20% (24,000 m²), and retail and services 10% (12,000 m²).
Two challenges made things interesting: the submissions had to be completed in 8 hours using only Forma Site Design, with Forma Board as the presentation tool. MVRDV formed four competition teams, each of which was assigned a recognizable building typology from MVRDV’s portfolio: The Valley, Courtyard, Campus, and Barcode.
The teams were under huge pressure—could they actually deliver in such a short time? The atmosphere in the office was exhilarating and intense! This way of working was serious fun, and the architects were no strangers to working under tight deadlines.
At 4pm, the whole office gathered to watch the four teams present their proposals. The results were impressive, especially how the teams strategically used Forma’s environmental analyses such as wind, sun hours, and noise to design with user comfort in mind. And the winner? The Courtyard team took home first prize with the infamous Norwegian cheese slicer as their trophy. We celebrated the success together with sushi and drinks on the rooftop of the Forma office.
Finally, on the third day, it was all about product feedback. The Forma team listened to the experiences from the architects based on how they pressure tested Forma during the competition, and already had ideas for improvements. Plus we gave the MVRDV team a sneak peek into the new Building Design tool and other features in development.
Forma Community connections
This three-day workshop was about much more than learning and testing Forma. Having MVRDV at our office opened up deeper conversations between architects and product developers. Our developers could observe up-close how architects work and respond to the tools we’re building for them. Now, when an architect from MVRDV asks a question in the Forma help chat, they’ll actually know the person answering on the other side. Building trust and relationships is equally as important as building technical skills.
The close connections we build through collaborating with architects help us keep learning about the industry and how we can apply new technology to help architects improve their workflows and, ultimately, build better cities. It matters to our developer teams too, knowing they have strong relationships with architects who share their mindset and ideas about design processes. We’re constantly developing new features, and it’s invaluable to have a community there ready to test and validate what we’re building.
We met for the product, but we connected over community. Thank you to MVRDV for joining us on this journey! We’re excited to develop more collaborations together, and to continue helping architects design better cities with data.