KIMON ONUMA, FAIA · FOUNDER + PRESIDENT · ONUMA, INC.
Buildings should not lose their intelligence.
For more than three decades, Kimon Onuma and ONUMA have worked on one persistent problem: how to keep the knowledge inside buildings alive, connected, useful and owner-controlled long after the original software, team or project phase disappears.
Architecture creates relationships. ONUMA works to keep those relationships alive.
Models, specifications, sensors, work orders, GIS, automation and AI are only useful when people and machines can understand how they relate. ONUMA’s body of work is a continuous attempt to preserve that meaning across design, construction, operations and change.
THE STORY
Nearly four decades of connected-building work.
1988
01
ONUMA, INC. FOUNDED
A practice built at the intersection of architecture, technology and information.
1993
02
BIM BEFORE BIM WAS MAINSTREAM
ONUMA describes Kimon as championing information-driven building modeling since 1993.
2000s
03
CLOUDBIM + WEB COLLABORATION
Building information moved into web-based, multi-user environments long before cloud delivery became normal.
2007
04
BIMSTORM
A live, distributed collaboration model for testing interoperability, open standards and real-time decision making.
2010s
05
OWNER-SCALE DEPLOYMENT
Federal, education, planning, facility and portfolio work expanded from projects to living information ecosystems.
2025
06
ZAIMAP + CONNECTED INTELLIGENCE
A system-of-systems direction connecting BIM, GIS, sensors, AI and people for situational awareness.
2026
07
ARCHITECTS OF INTELLIGENCE
The focus sharpens from collecting more data to preserving relationships, meaning and operational intelligence across time.
THE OPERATING PHILOSOPHY
Not another platform war.
01
OPEN OVER CLOSED
Open standards, APIs and shared identifiers keep owners from becoming trapped in one application.
02
MEANING OVER VOLUME
More data is not the goal. Context, relationships and shared meaning are what turn data into intelligence.
03
LIFECYCLE OVER HANDOVER
The intelligence created in design should survive construction, occupancy, operations and change.
04
SYSTEM OF SYSTEMS
No single product needs to own the whole building. Independent systems can remain independent and still connect.
05
OWNER CONTROL
Owners should retain control of their information, relationships and operational context.
06
REAL BUILDINGS, REAL TESTS
The strongest proof is a working building, a live mission, a failure, a repair and a repeatable result.
SYSTEMS + INITIATIVES
A connected ecosystem, not one monolith.
ONUMA’s work spans planning, BIM, GIS, facility operations, web services, open data exchange and AI-facing operational context. The names have evolved; the central idea has remained remarkably consistent.
ONUMA’s published client and project history crosses federal agencies, defense, education, planning, emergency services, facility management and standards work.
01U.S. Department of Defense
02U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs
03U.S. Department of State
04Department of Homeland Security
05U.S. General Services Administration
06U.S. Coast Guard
07California Community Colleges
08National Institute of Building Sciences
09buildingSMART
10PAE Living Building
THE OWNER QUESTION
Take ownership of your data and keep it alive.
Static deliverables decay. Connected information can continue to serve the owner.
SELECTED WORK
Projects where the ideas became infrastructure.
A few public examples show the range of ONUMA’s work: healthcare standards linked directly into BIM, statewide community-college facility data, federal planning and lifecycle programs, and live operational-building experiments.
The direction is not “put AI in a building.” It is to give AI reliable physical context, relationships and operational meaning so the building does not have to be reconstructed from disconnected files every time a question is asked.
PAE LIVING BUILDING
From models to meaning.
The PAE work is one of the clearest public examples of ONUMA’s current direction: reconnect design intent, geometry, persistent identifiers, semantic relationships, BAS and sensor data so operations can understand the building as a connected whole.
Public profile showroom assembled from ONUMA’s own published materials and other public institutional and editorial sources. It is intended to present ONUMA and Kimon Onuma’s work on their own terms.