The increasing awareness on climate change and carbon dioxide emissions from the built environment is resulting in the need to visualize the environmental performance of buildings.  One of the recent drivers in the UK has been the tightening of building regulations, which requires all buildings to be performance evaluated by accredited environmental simulation tools (Simplified Building Energy Model (SBEM), IES <Virtual Environment> (IES <VE>) to test their carbon dioxide emission targets.  This is required for building control approval and also a re-run of an ‘as built’ environmental simulation is undertaken before the project is handed over to the client.

Currently there is major confusion on all levels from architects to building control officers and contractors on how to engrain energy consciousness principles in the design and construction of buildings.  Within this context, building integrated modelling is increasingly being looked upon as a tool to facilitate the communication between the design team and contractors and to provide a transparent information model on the specification and targeted energy consumption of all new buildings to all parties involved.  In this paper, analysis of the benefits and drawbacks of current efforts to combine environmental assessment and specification with 3D computer visualisation are investigated. A sample of main software development companies, architects and contractors, using semi-structured interviews, to investigate how Building Integrated Modelling (BIM) can support the design and construction teams to deliver energy conscious buildings.

