Archive · September 2026
Nature-Inspired Algorithms: What the Water Cube's Foam Already Knew
How gradient-free metaheuristics — genetic algorithms, swarm, NSGA-II — grow structural form, why they work, and why the architect still hand-checks the code.
A Roof Found, Not Drawn: What Munich's 1972 Tent Still Teaches My Generation
The Olympiastadion's cable roof was form-found, not designed — what equilibrium structures and TNA teach heritage smart buildings about listening to their own loads.
Reality capture became a layer in someone else's platform — who owns your site record?
Procore's $845m DroneDeploy buy turns reality capture into a platform layer. The real asset is the scene graph — who owns your site record now?
ITER's coldest tolerance problem: a 17 m magnet that shrinks 50 mm before it works
A 17 m ITER fusion coil cold-shrinks ~50 mm at 4 K and still lands inside a millimetre. Neil Mitchell's retrospective, read as a tolerance lesson for your site.
After summer, AI back at your desk: inside our KI Back 2 Work Camp
PAZ Academy's KI Back 2 Work Camp on 23 Sept 2026: scope Archicad automation, tag project data, and put AI to work on your first week back. Bring one real task.
Eighteen Bits That Build a City You Have to Pay to Heat
Conway's Game of Life is B3/S23 — eighteen bits of rule. Play the sketch, read the party-wall share, and bring compactness to your massing review.
The missing-semicolon game is a clash-detection drill wearing a lab coat
A browser game hides one missing semicolon in 187,421 lines — and accidentally teaches BIM coordinators why open, greppable IFC beats lossless every time.
Your LLM never reads your IFC — it reads tokens, and IFC is the worst case
An IFC line costs ~31.6 tokens at 2.33 chars/token — 2.2× English. Measure it with tiktoken, and the "AI is bad at numbers" folklore becomes engineering.
Industry Foundation Classes: the open schema that is also your exit clause
IFC (ISO 16739-1:2024) is not just a file format — it is the open, Creative-Commons schema that keeps your building's data yours. A PAZ foundation essay.
Distance is also the product: what the 33/42 split says about proximity planning
A GPS study of 200 million trips finds the longest third of travel carries 42% of income-group mixing — so shortening the city spends encounters.
