Many of the costs of design, construction, and building operation derive from the reliance on drawings as the description of record of the building. As a replacement, this paper outlines the design of a computer system useful for storing and manipulating design information at a detail allowing design, construction, and operational analysis. A building is considered as the spatial composition of a set of parts. The system, called Building Description System (BDS) has the following associated with it: (1) a means for easy graphic entering of arbitrarily complex element shapes; (2) an interactive graphic language for editing and composing element arrangements; (3) hardcopy graphic capabilities that can produce perspective or orthographic drawings of high quality; and (4) a sort and format capability allowing sorting of the data base by attributes, for example, material type, supplier, or composing a data set for analysis. (Author)