Archive · August 2026
Drive the Cant: One Cross-Slope Solving an Equation With No Answer
Drive a live railway-cant section: equilibrium cant, deficiency and the 180 mm ceiling — then bridge the mechanic to every curved-fall surface in your office.
The World's Highest Bridge Is a 625-Metre Sensor: What Huajiang Teaches the Desk
The world's highest bridge embeds fibre load cells in 3 of 217 cable strands. Why the monitoring plan, not the record height, is the real engineering story.
buildingSMART Certification in 2026: worth it — or just learn to read the file?
Is the buildingSMART Professional Certification worth it in 2026? A Swiss cred-eval — plus how to actually learn IFC 4.3 with IfcOpenShell in an afternoon.
Karpathy's Homepage Is a Dependency Graph — the AI-for-AEC Lesson Hiding in a CV
Andrej Karpathy's karpathy.ai reads like a dependency graph - and it's the from-scratch lesson every AEC office adopting LLMs in 2026 needs before wiring one in.
Zurich Was Always a Chokepoint: Reading a City as a Dependency Graph
A Roman customs post to the busiest rail node in Switzerland — read Zurich as a betweenness-centrality graph, and map your own office's single points of failure.
The copilot we let into the model — and the door it left open
Microsoft Copilot's 2026 prompt-injection leak echoes the 2023 "Sydney" jailbreak. For a Swiss studio, the fix is a written access policy, not a licence.
Quantum computers don't have a breakthrough problem — they have a dependency problem
Quantum computing isn't waiting on one breakthrough but on an unclosed dependency graph — and the same systems discipline maps straight onto your studio's stack.
The 2,000-franc hand that pops instead of breaking: ETH's ORCA and the repairable robot
ETH Zurich's open-source ORCA hand delivers 17-DoF dexterity for under 2,000 CHF, with poppable joints you reprint instead of replace. Why repairable wins.
openBIM Is a Procurement Decision — the Politics Hiding in Your File Format
openBIM is a governance choice about who owns your building's data for life. Test the vendor claim, write one IDS rule, and draft the exit clause first.
Reciprocal Diagrams in Kangaroo: Read a Structure's Forces as a Second Shape
Dan Piker's Kangaroo-examples repo turns a relaxed mesh into a second force-diagram shape. A hands-on Grasshopper tutorial for architects and engineers.
