Before it reached a graduation stream, the idea we are watching on 25 August 2026 spent seven years on a drawing board at ETH Zürich’s Department of Architecture (D-ARCH). That is where Pablo Levine Mardones has been working inside Hubert Klumpner’s Vertical Gyms — a social building typology that Klumpner developed through Urban-Think Tank in Caracas, stacking sport, culture and public space into a single tower where flat land is scarce and municipal budgets are tighter.

The lineage explains why the tooling changed. La Fábrica de Cultura in Barranquilla — the project through which Pablo began collaborating with the Chair seven years ago — proved the concept. The new generation now rising in Medellín (two towers under construction, a third in early design) raises the difficulty: it fuses sport with culture, using reggaeton and its urban scene as the cultural anchor, on municipally owned sites chosen precisely to avoid land-acquisition costs. Free land buys you a hard constraint — awkward, pre-committed geometry you have to design around.

←TODAY: In 2026 a Caracas typology is being computed against Medellín sites from a desk in Switzerland. →3012: The office that outlives its founder is the one whose methods were teachable, not heroic. Fulcrum: A constrained site is solvable in an afternoon only when its programs are parameters instead of plans.

Here is the working-desk part. Pablo parametrised four systems — sport, culture, services and circulation — so that dimensions and spatial relationships became sliders rather than redrawn floor plates. David Rutten’s Galapagos, the evolutionary solver native to Grasshopper, then searches that space for configurations that pack the most usable program into the site while keeping the four systems in a sane relationship. The chosen option connects straight into Revit, so the coordination model that teams in Zürich and Colombia both edit stays live. PAZ has covered this competency thread before — our Building System Specialist student stories describe scripts that “adapt to terrain, views, regulations, wind and sun,” which is the same move at a different scale.

Hack: Score a massing option before Galapagos ever ranks it. The solver only optimises the number you hand it, so the fitness function carries the entire design argument. Here is a minimal one for a constrained Vertical-Gym stack — reward packed program, punish starved circulation:

def fitness(sport, culture, services, circ, site_area):
    used = sport + culture + services + circ
    if circ < 0.15 * used: return 0.0            # starve circulation, score zero
    balance = min(sport, culture) / max(sport, culture)
    return (used / site_area) * balance           # Galapagos maximises this

Change one weight and the whole tower reorganises; that single line carries the architect’s judgement, and the solver only obeys it.

Atelier: For a Büro adopting AI-assisted parametric work, the takeaway from this graduation is blunt — cheap or free sites arrive with expensive geometry, and the office that wins them can test fifty massings before lunch. Your Monday move: take one live constrained-site project, list its three or four hard programs, and rebuild them as Grasshopper parameters feeding a single Galapagos fitness function — even a rough one — before your next design review.

The graduation streams live on 25 August 2026, and it is worth an hour because you watch the reasoning rather than the render: how four systems become four parameters, and where the solver helps against where it cannot. It sits inside the Building System Specialist track (Edition XIV opens 1 September 2026), the same five-month, six-hours-a-week path whose last cohort certified 22 Building System Specialists — graduates who keep building their own tools rather than renting someone else’s. If you run an Archicad or Revit desk and have ever lost a week redrawing a program that should have been a slider, watch how Pablo did it, then open one of your own stalled sites and give it four parameters.