The paper discusses properties of the future digital Virtual Buildings from the client, design, construction and operation and maintenance perspectives. In this context the author defines a Virtual Building as "a formalized digital description of an existing or planned building which can be used to fully simulate and communicate the behavior of the real building in its expected contexts".

The ultimate goal of these efforts is a virtual reality environment where designers create, directly manipulate, and test the end building products in their 'real' contexts.

• Introduction
• Climbing the abstraction ladder
• What's new?
  • The Virtual Building Concept
  • Virtual Building Definition
  • Performance of the final product : Responsive buildings.
  • The design process
  • Handling redundancy in the Virtual Building.
• Virtual Building in Context
  • Environmental loads
  • Temporal Aspects of Data
  • Virtual Building Universe of Discourse
  • The Virtual Building as a Shared Workspace