Archive · August 2026
Review of the Week: The Body Counts CO₂ While the City Draws Its Own Failure Graph
ISO week 2026-W35 recap: ETH's ~47% lower-CO₂ funicular deck, the 2,000-CHF ORCA hand, openBIM as procurement, and the dependency-graph motif that ran hot.
The planet turns twice — and every flat plan on your desk pays for it
Precession, obliquity and the theorem that no map keeps both angle and area. Why Zurich offices should set the CRS to EPSG:2056, not Web Mercator 3857.
BSS Title XIV opens tomorrow: five months to build the tool your office is missing
Edition XIV of PAZ Academy's Building System Specialist Title starts 1 September 2026: five months of Grasshopper, Archicad and Revit automation you build yourself.
Generative architecture: you stop drawing the building and start authoring the machine that finds it
Generative architecture flips design: you write the constraints and let the solver find the form. From Stiny's shape grammars to ETH's Shea — a PAZ foundation.
The City That Publishes Its Own Bones: Mining Zürich's Open Data From a BIM Desk
Zürich publishes its civic data free on CKAN. Here is how a BIM or Grasshopper office pulls parcels, zoning and vacancy figures with ten lines of Python.
Alien Intelligence on Your Desk: Why AEC Can't Benchmark the AI It Trusts
Melanie Mitchell calls LLMs 'alien intelligence' we can't measure. What that means for any architecture office wiring an unauditable model into its workflow.
The Floor That Kept Its Promise: ETH's Rippmann Floor System Goes Tower-Scale in Zug
CreaTower I: VAULTED AG's Rippmann Floor System reaches tower scale in Zug, a ribbed vault with about 47% less concrete CO₂ than a flat slab, fourteen years in the making.
Bellard's Page: What One Maintainer's Dependency Graph Teaches Every Office
Fabrice Bellard's one-page stack — FFmpeg, QEMU, TCC, NNCP — shows every office why the dependency graph, not the architecture diagram, tells the truth.
ASML books 'documentation recovery' as engineering — and so should your 14-person studio
ASML funds a decade-long program to keep 1990s scanners alive through documentation recovery — the same knowledge debt a 14-person practice carries undocumented.
One volume, two hosts: what crossed clean between Grasshopper, Revit and Archicad
PAZ ran one Grasshopper volume into Revit and Archicad live — the BRep crossed clean, the deconstruct's first port didn't. The practical interoperability lesson.
