We propose a system-level design flow for building automation and control (BAC) systems. The input to the design flow is a high level description of the control algorithms given in a model-based environment such as Simulink. The input specification is translated into an intermediate format, and then automatically refined into a distributed implementation. Refinement includes optimal mapping of the functional specification on a set of computation and communication resources, and software synthesis, which generates code for each component in the mapped design while guaranteeing semantic equivalence with the original specification. Experiments with a temperature control system are presented to illustrate the flow