Archive · August 2026
Rehearsal without concrete: MIT's SceneSmith and the sim gap my fleet still pays for
MIT CSAIL's SceneSmith generates robot training worlds from text with GPT-5.2 agents. From the site floor: why your IFC model is the map robots actually need.
Meta Switched Off Its Worlds in June. Nobody Could Export Them — Now Read Your BIM Contract
Meta removed Horizon Worlds from Quest on 15 June 2026 and community worlds were never exported — $88B of Reality Labs losses later. What AEC teams should demand about open formats before signing.
Class, struct, or record: the three-way choice that mutates 4,000 points
A hands-on C# tutorial for computational designers: when a coordinate should copy and a model element should be shared — value vs reference, on 4,000 points.
Timber Shell Structures: How a Few Centimetres of Curved Wood Learn to Span a Hall
How timber shells carry load in-plane like Mannheim's lath net and BUGA's 376 cassettes — form-finding, faceting, buckling, and building for disassembly.
The Provenance Stack: A PAZ Office SOP for AI Watermarks
Anthropic marked Claude's text on 2 Aug 2026; a stripper followed in ten days. The four-layer provenance system, and a PAZ office SOP for handling it.
Review of the Week — W33: The week Swiss AEC stopped waiting for the software to ship
Week 33 recap: Swiss engineers build tools vendors never shipped, Terafab's 1 TW ceiling, Graphisoft's collaboration layer, Betuwe InSAR data, and Rotterdam's green facade debate.
Before you let a model draw: Dr. Mikhael Johanes' BSS AI talk
1 Sept 2026: Dr. Mikhael Johanes opens PAZ's BSS Edition XIV with a talk on what an ML model really does when it reads a design brief. Free, open door.
Singapore's 50% green cover: which numbers are physics, and which are bought
Singapore's biophilic city hits ~50% green cover. Which numbers are transferable physics and which are bought with a governance model no European practice owns.
NURBS in 30 Minutes: The Four Numbers Behind Every Curve You've Ever Lofted
Degree, control points, knots, weight — the mathematics under every Rhino curve, taught hands-on with the open-source rhino3dm library. Clone it and read the four numbers yourself.
Piezoelectric Materials: How a Building Learns to Feel Its Own Load
A PAZ foundation essay on piezoelectricity — from the Curies' 1880 discovery to why d33 makes it a superb structural sensor and a poor power harvester.
