Archive · August 2026
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.
Pigeon Puts the Wait Back In — What a Slow Messaging App Knows About Your Model
Pigeon sells deliberate latency; DTN and IFC prove your model was always delayed mail. Read the IfcOwnerHistory postmark before the site trusts the file.
Graph engineering for the BIM desk: build your clash-check as a state machine
LangGraph turns clash-detection into an auditable state machine. A PAZ Academy hands-on tutorial: build a cyclic clash-check graph, route severity, keep humans in the loop.
A basil leaf on a steak: what Rotterdam Rocks! asks a building to swallow
Barnabas Calder's Dezeen critique of MVRDV's €240m Shift Embassy, read from the building's side — why a leafy facade is accounting, not decarbonisation.
