Buildings are specified in an abstract way which records what the architect wants to build and not how it is actually built in terms of their drawings but rather in a linguistic way, by structural composition of standard space units according to an abstract syntax equipped with space aggregation constructs, subject to invariant properties which check for building well-formedness.

A formal model is developed for such an abstract syntax and for its associated functionality which (as layer prototyped in a rapid- prototyping shell) has mainly to do with automatically generating building plans from abstract descriptions. At prototype level, this is first achieved by structurally calculating LATEX picture format drawings as a pictorial semantics of the abstract descriptions. in second phase, the adopted output graphical server is the AUTOCAD^TM system.

Throughout thses experiments, not only formal methods greatly inceraed confidence on the building-description language correctness, expressive power and conciseness, but also rapid prototyping provided a lot of insight on what one is designing, at a very low cost.

A prospect of implementation is given which not inly will provide the system as a "plug-in" extension of AUTOCAD for WINDOWS but also will connect it to an underlying production database allowing for automatic housing project materials planning and buget control.

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