PAZ Kaffi is the AEC newsroom of PAZ Academy Zürich — daily dispatches on architecture, computational design, BIM and AI.
Giger's Alien: El Origen runs free at level -3 of Ñuñoa station in Santiago. Read the Swiss artist as a builder, then array a ribbed vault in Grasshopper.
01 NOV
Stanford engineers reflect room-temperature thermal noise to send bits, reaching kilobit rates. What passive links mean for sensors in Swiss buildings.
01 NOV
Why a soap film finds the least-area surface: zero mean curvature, Plateau's 120° law, and how Frei Otto carried it to Lausanne 1964 and Munich 1972.
31 OCT
CH
How C4, a 56 m concrete drum in Chavannes-près-Renens, frees its ground floor: 34 bored piles, a jointless 360 m raft and one prestressed transfer slab.
31 OCT
CH
Allen + Crippa won Holcim's open SIA 142 competition in Siggenthal with «Holcim Lab»: a kept shed roof, re-used slabs and carbon-prestressed CPC concrete.
31 OCT
Type a floor-to-floor height, try every riser count, test each against Blondel's rule and the Swiss BFU and SIA 500 bounds. 75 lines of plain Python.
30 OCT
CH
BLS is rebuilding 1.7 km of track into Interlaken Ost and strengthening two listed 1915 riveted Aare bridges for 50 more years, all for 400 m InterCitys.
30 OCT
Drag the sun, watch the section light up: raycasting from Wolfenstein 3D to SN EN 17037, with a GhPython snippet that scores how much floor the sun reaches.
30 OCT
CH
Free Archicad Powersession, 18 Nov 2026 in Zürich: SIA 400 dimensioning, norm checks, model hygiene and SIA 416 areas checked live in the model. 20 seats.
"The machine doesn't have taste. We have taste. The machine has a tempo."
29 OCT
CH
Urban scaling says dense cities pay off, yet Zürich lost 21,500 residents to its hinterland. The OECD finds room for 1.6 million inside today's zones.
29 OCT
Metropolis turns 100 as Don Davis opens its centenary in Lyon. Read Lang's stacked city as a section, and draw your project's lower city on the sheet.
29 OCT
Build a U-value and Glaser condensation check in plain Python: same wall, same insulation, one swap, and 0 vs 4.44 kg/m² of winter water. Code included.
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.
Giger's Alien: El Origen runs free at level -3 of Ñuñoa station in Santiago. Read the Swiss artist as a builder, then array a ribbed vault in Grasshopper.
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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