The interesting number in the VAULTED story is not 70% less concrete. It is fourteen. That is roughly how long it took to walk a doctoral thesis on Gothic masonry — Philippe Block’s MIT work under John Ochsendorf, where 2D graphic statics became 3D thrust network analysis, which Matthias Rippmann then coded into RhinoVAULT — all the way to an ETH Zürich spin-off with a factory and a signed ten-storey job. As a mid-size practice on the Sihlquai, that arc is the part we actually study.

The signal. VAULTED AG (founded 2023; Block chairman, Tom Van Mele CTO, Francesco Ranaudo CEO, Alessandro Dell’Endice COO) is delivering its Rippmann Floor System — a prefabricated, unreinforced, funicular concrete deck — at CreaTower I on the Tech Cluster Zug site. Client Urban Assets Zug AG, architect Gigon/Guyer, who proposed the system. ETH ITA’s conservative framing: roughly two-thirds the concrete and one-tenth the steel of a flat slab; the Tech Cluster Zug project page cites about 47% CO₂ saved on the structure. Forces want to arch to the supports; a flat slab forces them through bending. Reintroduce the arch plus a tension tie and the mass falls away.

←TODAY: A lab became a company insurers and a fire authority let a tower stand on — by proving on a 1:1 mock-up what a performance-based Swiss code lets an engineer argue from. →3012: Every deck in Kreis 5 is form-found, and the flat slab reads like a horse-drawn tram. Fulcrum: The floor got lighter only because one office refused, for fourteen years, to change the system between projects.

What we borrow. Not the vault — we are not casting funicular decks tomorrow. We borrow the practice-management spine underneath it. Three moves are transferable to a 14-person Büro. First, COMPAS: the group’s open computational framework let architects, engineers and fabricators develop against one shared model in parallel and, in Block’s telling at PAZ Central in April 2023, “hit print” two weeks before install. Second, IFC discipline — COMPAS IFC exists, Block said, precisely because “the IFC standard is being used almost like a legal requirement to deliver a model to a fabricator.” Third, the code nerve: “tell me where the nine centimetres come from and if I can show you we need six, I will use six.” That is Ausführungsplanung as argument, not compliance-by-default.

Atelier: The seam that bites a small office is the leap from a competition model to something a fabricator and an insurer will accept — and neither reads Grasshopper. Your Monday move: pick one live project and write the two custom property sets your quantities depend on (concrete volume, rebar mass) into a documented IFC4 export mapping, so the model that wins the Wettbewerb is the same model that prices the job. Like a squad that keeps one idea and drills it — the way the current world champions did — repeatability, not talent, is the bottleneck for a studio your size.

Hack: Pull the deck’s concrete volume straight from the IFC before you price any funicular alternative — argue from your own number, not the vendor’s press figure.

import ifcopenshell, ifcopenshell.util.element as el
m = ifcopenshell.open("creatower_LOD300.ifc")
vol = sum(el.get_psets(s).get("Qto_SlabBaseQuantities", {}).get("NetVolume", 0)
          for s in m.by_type("IfcSlab"))
print(f"{vol:.1f} m3 of deck concrete on the table")

The honest trade-off: prefabrication moves risk off the site but front-loads it into fabricator trust and testing — VAULTED spent five years with a print partner before Striatus, and a Belgian job needed a 150-page fire report and a 7×7 m furnace test. That runway is the real cost of a new system, and a small office has to budget it in hours, not hope.

PAZ Takeaway: The capability that answers this office’s problem is a documented early-stage funicular feasibility check in Grasshopper + Rhino — form-found geometry that already carries the property sets your Archicad quantity take-off and your IFC handover expect — so a competition sketch survives the leap to an execution model without a rebuild. PAZ builds exactly that seam between Grasshopper and Archicad.

Do the unglamorous thing first: before the next plugin, write down your own IFC export mapping and measure what it earns back. That is what turned a thesis into a tower.