The case
Kimon Onuma, architect, Fellow of the AIA and founder of ONUMA, Inc., has run one byline on AutomatedBuildings.com almost every week for the past eighteen months, roughly sixty articles since February 2025, and together they read like a field notebook on what it actually takes to make a building’s information useful.
“A building is an information system. The information belongs to the owner. Open standards are the only thing that keeps it alive.”
He has been making the same argument since 1993, when he began practicing model-based design before the industry had a name for it: buildings outlive the software that describes them, so the description has to be data the owner holds, in standards anyone can read, not a view trapped inside one vendor’s screen.
What follows is a short guide to his thinking, the work behind the byline, and a complete index of his writing in these pages.
Three convictions
Data over geometry
A model earns its keep when the building can answer a real question with it. Renderings that look intelligent and do nothing, he calls “Hollywood BIM.”
The owner stays sovereign
Owning the software is not the same as owning the intelligence it manages. Work that only runs inside one dashboard is just another silo.
Open standards are infrastructure
IFC, COBie, RDF, buildingSMART, OGC — not a compliance checkbox, but the plumbing that lets independent systems connect without a master integrator or vendor lock-in.
What his point of view brings
BIM is data, not geometry
Test every model against a decision someone has to make. If it can’t inform one, the geometry is scenery.
The exit test
Before hiring a digital-twin vendor, ask how you would leave: do the data, identifiers, relationships and history survive the switch? The exit test should be part of the entrance test.
Interoperability is not a megaproject
Against the myth that connection takes years and a master integrator, he stages live demonstrations where independent systems join the same building in days.
A connected point is not intelligence
A temperature reading matters only once it is tied to a space, a piece of equipment, a responsible party and a permitted action. Models → Meaning → Intent → Lifecycle.
A building is a living system
Not another pane of glass but a nervous system, intelligence that emerges across connected systems, as his PAE Living Building series traces.
AI grounded in operational reality
Buildings are for humans. An AI that correctly refuses an unauthorized action — an intelligent no
— is proof of trust, not a defect.
Openness is a security posture
Fragmented, hidden, undocumented data is itself the vulnerability. Well-governed open data is the safer state, not the riskier one.
Automate the waste, not the work
Up to 50% of the effort of designing, constructing and maintaining a building is waste.
Automate the broken 19th-century process; keep the judgment.
“Show me how I can fire you.”
— the question every owner should ask before signing a digital-twin contract
The work behind the byline
Start here — ten articles
Complete archive — 60 articles
Every piece Onuma has published on the current AutomatedBuildings.com site, newest first. Marked ▪ start entries are the ten above.
Before the current site
Onuma’s work here runs back further. Two earlier landmarks:
— BIG BIM BANG (2011): the 50%-waste manifesto and the case for open over monolithic.
— BIMStorm brings Cloud Computing to ConnectivityWeek (2009): BIM models carrying live sensor and energy data on a map, years before “digital twin” was a phrase.
Colophon
An editorial feature prepared by AutomatedBuildings.com · September 2026. Article notes draw on the site’s own listings. Biographical details and project figures (VA/DoD SEPS, U.S. Department of State OBO, California Community Colleges) are drawn from ONUMA, Inc. and the National Institute of Building Sciences and are being confirmed with Kimon ahead of publication.
