PAZ Kaffi is the AEC newsroom of PAZ Academy Zürich — daily dispatches on architecture, computational design, BIM and AI.
Week 41 in review: 5.5 % of Swiss ice lost, the Rhône widened to 90 m, Riehen's 65 °C heat network, EPFL's site robots and an IfcOpenShell door check.
12 OCT
Our Archicad Powersession on 14 October tackles Modellhygiene: clean storeys, layers and zones so handovers, scripts and AI can trust your BIM model.
12 OCT
CH
Zürich voters adopted stricter high-rise rules: public ground floors from 40 m, a competition for every tower, bonus floor area for affordable housing.
11 OCT
How one idea, cutting each leg of a control polygon at the same ratio, became the Bézier curve and the NURBS geometry behind every Rhino control point.
11 OCT
Blade Runner's 2019 was shot inside the 1894 Bradbury atrium. Syd Mead's retro-deco shows why a believable future is built on existing fabric, as in Umbau.
11 OCT
IfcOpenShell 0.9.0 rewrote its C++ core. Install it with pip, open any IFC, write a door schedule CSV and flag every door missing a FireRating in Python.
10 OCT
CH
Zurich cooperative pool became pool Architektur in 2026. How a weekly all-partner crit and shared income kept 500+ projects going without a star name.
10 OCT
CH
Boltshauser's Hotel Leo won Mendelsohn Award Gold: a precast concrete frame with 50 kg unfired earth-block partitions pressed from nearby excavation spoil.
10 OCT
CH
Basel's Grosser Rat lends CHF 7.6 million to grow Riehen's 1994 geothermal heat network by 5.5 km and 620 connections. What it means for your heating design.
"The machine doesn't have taste. We have taste. The machine has a tempo."
09 OCT
CH
Vaud and Valais open the CHF 368m Chablais inquiry: 14 km of Rhône widened to 90 m, shared by three government levels and eight communes. Open to 2 Nov.
09 OCT
A cord can only pull, so a flipped hanging net only pushes. Follow Gaudí, Frei Otto and ETH's Block Research Group, then reseed the sketch in your browser.
09 OCT
Free 30-minute Zoom session in German, 7 October 2026: Archicad dimensions a full storey to SIA 400 in one click, with chains bound to design changes.
A studio in District B-12 has been operating in three time zones for nineteen months, with a permanent night shift that handles the regulator's queue while the rest of the world sleeps. The model: caffeine, clear handoffs, and a refusal to pretend that buildings are designed during business hours. We embedded for two nights.
Week 41 in review: 5.5 % of Swiss ice lost, the Rhône widened to 90 m, Riehen's 65 °C heat network, EPFL's site robots and an IfcOpenShell door check.
Every morning at 04:00 the press in the basement of the kaffi spits out 2,400 broadsheets in a font we cut ourselves. The kids pick them up on the way to site, fold them into their toolbelts, and read them at lunch with grease on their fingers. The feed has not killed this. The feed has made it more useful — a single, slow, opinionated edit of a day too noisy to read live.
The print desk takes one position per story. The web desk runs a hundred. Both can be true. The point is that someone, somewhere, is still willing to pick.
There is a reason the best façade we ran this month was sketched on a napkin in the kaffi at 06:12 and not generated in a prompt. The hand still knows things the model has to be told twice.
Every studio we visit now hires straight into a 22:00–06:00 rotation. The juniors love it. The seniors who fought to get out of it find it harder to argue with the throughput numbers.
Hybrid CLT + steel core. Topping out by Q3.
Robotic masonry hits a real spec, not a demo.
And why the big vendors are quietly nervous.
Maps, owners, opening hours, kaffi quality.
The AEC dispatch lands in your inbox at 04:42 CET. Twelve stories, one bad joke, zero PR fluff. We sign each one.
The airlock is still sealed. Join the dispatch for now — VIP seats get called there first.
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