Archive · July 2026
September, the desk after summer: what our KI Back 2 Work Camp is actually for
PAZ Academy's KI Back 2 Work Camp runs 23–24 September 2026 in Zurich — two days turning summer AI headlines into repeatable desk habits for architects.
The Floor Knows the Way Out: Crowd Egress as a Distance Field You Can Play
A distance field floods 'steps to safety' across your floorplate — the game mechanic behind crowd egress, and a Monday-morning travel-distance check for any plan.
What 80,500 km of Roman stone still teaches about design life
80,500 km of Roman stone-paving lasted a millennium because drainage and a named maintenance owner were designed in. What that teaches AEC teams in 2026.
Galapagos at Fifteen: The Honest Solver David Rutten Gave the Building Industry
David Rutten's Galapagos brought evolutionary optimisation to Grasshopper in 2010. A hands-on guide to the solver that shaped a generation of buildings.
Vector Databases: The Nearest-Neighbour Geometry Under Every RAG Pipeline
Vector-database adoption grew 377% in 2025. Strip the marketing and it is nearest-neighbour search — a Voronoi partition of meaning-space. The maths, explained.
Chandigarh Is a Dependency Graph — and Le Corbusier Drew Every Single Point of Failure
Le Corbusier's 7V hierarchy made Chandigarh elegant and legible — and a tree full of single points of failure. Read the master plan like a systems engineer.
Tor Alva: The White Tower That Grew Its Own Skeleton in Concrete
ETH Zurich's Tor Alva stands on 32 printed concrete columns in Mulegns. The real win is reinforced thin-walled printing — here's the lesson for your desk.
Reading the Platform: Why an SBB Node Is Switzerland's Highest-Value Urban Problem
An SBB node is never a station — it's this platform, this 800m walkshed. Read transit-oriented density from the timetable and rank your parcels first.
Astrobee: The Open-Source Robot Lesson for Every Site Crew
NASA's Astrobee free-flyer runs an open ROS stack students can program in orbit. Why a readable, resettable robot beats the sealed demo on any site.
Mojo Wants Your Hot Loops — Read the Compiler Licence First
Modular's Mojo pairs Python syntax with GPU kernels and real speed — but the compiler stays closed until 2026. Trial it, benchmark it, and write the exit clause first.
