PAZ Kaffi is the AEC newsroom of PAZ Academy Zürich — daily dispatches on architecture, computational design, BIM and AI.
Musk's 100M-sq-ft, $16.8B Terafab reads as the world's largest building — but at 1 TW of compute the heat load, not floor area, decides if it's even physical.
12 AUG
CH
Graphisoft's new open collaboration layer and Archicad–Forma link promise one source of truth — here's how a 14-person studio should verify the IFC round-trip first.
12 AUG
Asimo retired unsold; the $16k Unitree G1 shipped. Inside Japan's 80,000-hour VLA data commons — and the openBIM-style bet on prototypes versus platforms.
11 AUG
Fisher's 1936 discriminant, four lines of scikit-learn, and your own IFC export: a hands-on classifier that triages dirty BIM imports for Swiss studios.
11 AUG
How Nitinol and shape memory alloys separate damage from deformation — the physics of self-centering seismic braces, from Buehler's 1965 patent to Assisi.
11 AUG
University of Twente fused 170 Sentinel-1 radar scenes with national LiDAR to flag the soft-soil Betuwe freight segments subsiding 30 mm before any survey train.
10 AUG
SBB's CHF 280m Iltis award, Copernicus's 24-hour delay, DeepSeek-V4's KV cut and Remise Rosa — the week PAZ Kaffi drew the single point of failure.
10 AUG
A new arXiv method drops ray-matching for image-conditioned pose diffusion, holding sub-meter indoor localization on S3D and ZInD without lookup tables.
10 AUG
PAZ Academy's BSS Edition XIV opens 1 Sept 2026 with Sebastian Lieb's Archicad–Grasshopper–RFEM timber-structures pipeline. What it teaches and who it's for.
"The machine doesn't have taste. We have taste. The machine has a tempo."
09 AUG
Fields medallist Jacob Tsimerman left maths for OpenAI's AI-safety work. The lesson for AEC offices: put the guarantee in the wiring, not in trust.
09 AUG
Wolfram's Integrate page shows off closed-form calculus. SymPy does the same in open Python you own — turn a load into a bending moment in four lines.
09 AUG
How segmented shells keep membrane efficiency while deleting the mould — from Candela to BUGA's 376 timber segments to ETH's demountable concrete floors.
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.
Musk's 100M-sq-ft, $16.8B Terafab reads as the world's largest building — but at 1 TW of compute the heat load, not floor area, decides if it's even physical.
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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