PAZ Kaffi is the AEC newsroom of PAZ Academy Zürich — daily dispatches on architecture, computational design, BIM and AI.
W30 recap: PAZGPT in Archicad, NVIDIA open-weights provenance, EPFL's 30% solar cell, PSI's solid-state battery, and why every AI output needs a pinned hash.
27 JUL
Claude Opus 5 reconstructed a machine part from a drawing it couldn't see. What that means for AEC reconstruction — and why every agent output needs a source stamp.
27 JUL
PAZ opens Building System Specialist Title XIV on 1 Sept 2026 — five months, six hours a week, teaching Grasshopper-and-Archicad system-building over manual drawing.
26 JUL
NVIDIA put 650 open models and 250 datasets on Hugging Face. For architecture offices the payload is not speed — it is a checkpoint you can cite.
26 JUL
What a UMAT really is, why return mapping conserves volume, and the one question to ask your engineer before signing off any FEA result.
26 JUL
Synthace put ChatGPT inside a biology lab using a context-aware prompt, JSON contract, and error-feedback loop. AEC runs the same three-layer shape.
25 JUL
PSI's mild-sintering plus 65nm LiF coating keeps a lithium-metal solid-state cell at 75% after 1,500 cycles — and what it means for building-scale storage.
25 JUL
OpenKnowledge turns a folder of markdown into an AI-readable office wiki over MCP — and keeps your practice's knowledge in files that outlive the vendor.
25 JUL
NBS and Circular Ecology's new guide puts A1-A5 embodied-carbon factors on BIM objects — geometry-led. What it means for a working studio's model.
"The machine doesn't have taste. We have taste. The machine has a tempo."
24 JUL
A 1968 algae grammar in three lines of Python — what branching L-systems actually buy a working architecture office, and where the fabrication cost hides.
24 JUL
Circular construction needs recoverable joints, not just recyclable materials. Material passports, CPR 2024/3110, and one IFC query to audit disassembly.
24 JUL
A self-hosted MCP workflow runner shows why the audit trail — not autonomy — is what makes automation safe on an architecture office's model.
A studio in District B-12 has been operating in three time zones for nineteen months, with a permanent night shift that handles the regulator's queue while the rest of the world sleeps. The model: caffeine, clear handoffs, and a refusal to pretend that buildings are designed during business hours. We embedded for two nights.
W30 recap: PAZGPT in Archicad, NVIDIA open-weights provenance, EPFL's 30% solar cell, PSI's solid-state battery, and why every AI output needs a pinned hash.
Every morning at 04:00 the press in the basement of the kaffi spits out 2,400 broadsheets in a font we cut ourselves. The kids pick them up on the way to site, fold them into their toolbelts, and read them at lunch with grease on their fingers. The feed has not killed this. The feed has made it more useful — a single, slow, opinionated edit of a day too noisy to read live.
The print desk takes one position per story. The web desk runs a hundred. Both can be true. The point is that someone, somewhere, is still willing to pick.
There is a reason the best façade we ran this month was sketched on a napkin in the kaffi at 06:12 and not generated in a prompt. The hand still knows things the model has to be told twice.
Every studio we visit now hires straight into a 22:00–06:00 rotation. The juniors love it. The seniors who fought to get out of it find it harder to argue with the throughput numbers.
Hybrid CLT + steel core. Topping out by Q3.
Robotic masonry hits a real spec, not a demo.
And why the big vendors are quietly nervous.
Maps, owners, opening hours, kaffi quality.
The AEC dispatch lands in your inbox at 04:42 CET. Twelve stories, one bad joke, zero PR fluff. We sign each one.
The airlock is still sealed. Join the dispatch for now — VIP seats get called there first.
© 2026 PAZ Academy.
