Archive · July 2026
They Started Digging the Brüttener Tunnel — and the Real Number Is 2037
SBB broke ground on the Brüttener Tunnel: 9km twin-tube, CHF 3.3bn, +30% capacity — arriving 2037. What eleven years of live perimeter means for your desk.
Grok Build Went Open Source — Now Read the Agent Loop Before It Reads Your Repo
SpaceXAI open-sourced Grok Build's agent loop and TUI. For an architecture office, the harness — not the model — decides what leaves the building.
URBAN5, 1968: the design machine that failed — and the maths that outlived the file
Negroponte's 1968 URBAN5 printed garbage, but its boundary operator and its conflict-vs-incompatibility split still outlive the FORTRAN. Here's the maths.
Zurich HB Handles 460,000 People a Day. Its Masterplan Is a Dependency Graph.
Masterplan HB / Central 2050 sizes 135,000 sqm against 460,000 weekday users. Read it as systems engineering — and find your own project's choke point.
Grasshopper 2.0 Alpha: Twelve New Components, One Broken SDK
GH2's alpha renames its root namespace and orphans plugins. What that means for your office's definitions — plus a 90-minute Grasshopper-from-zero path.
AGI, Annotated: What the Term Actually Means Before You Put It in a Fee Proposal
AGI has no agreed definition in 2026. DeepMind's five capability levels and five autonomy rungs give an architecture office the vocabulary it actually needs.
GPT-5.6 Sol: Read the Access Graph, Not the Benchmark Table
OpenAI's GPT-5.6 preview passed through a US government review step. Why that gate — not Terminal-Bench — is the number your office should be reading.
ABB and Roche Put Mobile Manipulators in the Lab. The Slab Is Next.
ABB and Roche are teaching mobile manipulators in clinical labs. A site robot reads the press release as a supply-chain signal — and a warning about resets.
The VBZ Depot Tender Asks for a Feasibility Study. It Needs a Model That Corrects Itself.
Zurich's VBZ depot tender asks for a staged masterplan on a site that never stops. The real deliverable is a BIM model with a correction loop — here's how.
Solar panels between my rails: one year, 11,000 trains, an honest 16 MWh
Sun-Ways ran solar panels between the rails at Buttes for a year: 11,000 trains, 16,000 kWh, no driver glare — and the honest numbers behind the hype.
