Open source Elements library for another IFC API

Greetings IFC community!

Our new company, Hypar, is putting IFC at the heart of our platform for Generative Design. More than a year ago, we started work on IFC-gen, an open source set of tools to generate IFC software libraries from the IFC4 schema: GitHub - hypar-io/IFC-gen: Industry Foundation Classes (IFC) code generator..

We’re now building on top of that work with the Elements library: GitHub - hypar-io/Elements: The smallest useful BIM.. Elements is a small, open source, software library written in C# and targeting the .net core runtime which allows AEC developers to write code to generate buildings using a higher-level API than what is available directly from IFC. Models created with the Elements library serialize to JSON, and will soon serialize to IFC4 as well.

We’re building the Elements library to power Hypar, but it can also be used in Revit addins, Unity, or any other context where .net is supported including AWS Lambda, and Azure Functions.

Our hope with this work is to build the “leading edge” API for AEC, which can then influence the development of standards like IFC. As such, the Elements library is a great place to design and prototype types and functionality before proposing their inclusion in the IFC standard.

I’m sure we’ll have many IFC questions in the days to come and I’m looking forward to conversations both here and on the open source projects that we’re developing.