PAZ Kaffi is the AEC newsroom of PAZ Academy Zürich — daily dispatches on architecture, computational design, BIM and AI.
Trinity College Dublin trials a red-mud geopolymer in existing batching kit: 67.8–79.8 % lower carbon than CEM II-A/L, 109.7 % strength after freeze-thaw.
05 NOV
CH
Geneva's Grand Conseil turned the 16.5 % HBM minimum in development zones into a maximum. What one flipped sign means for PLQ programmes and area schedules.
05 NOV
CH
Read Zürich's CC0 tree cadastre in LV95 with standard-library Python: list trees near a site, flag 8 m placeholder crowns, test a footprint first.
04 NOV
A Nature paper from Beijing, Tsinghua, Xi'an Jiaotong and UCLA grows metre-tall Ti-6Al-4V single crystals by pulsing a WAAM torch. What it means for AEC.
04 NOV
CH
RhB and Chur opened Bahnhof Chur West on 26 Oct 2026: moved 200 m off a 393 m curve onto a 65 m prestressed two-trough bridge with V-columns over a square.
04 NOV
Origin's OG-1 spreads, sands and primes plasterboard to 4.27 m with admittance control. Why Swiss offices should write finish grades into the model.
03 NOV
YC Labs and Olam Labs gave 50 agents one vague brief in Minecraft. Trees vanished in 90 seconds, then permits arrived. Two lines your brief needs.
03 NOV
Les Utopiales 2026 in Nantes hangs Léa Murawiec, Superstudio and Miel Vandepitte side by side. Why every perspective an architect draws argues for a plan.
03 NOV
Gauss's 1827 Theorema Egregium: K = k1·k2, why only zero-curvature panels unroll flat, and how to sort a facade by K in Rhino and Grasshopper.
"The machine doesn't have taste. We have taste. The machine has a tempo."
02 NOV
Review of W44: Brienz drainage, a Glaser condensation check in Python, raycast daylight and the OECD's 1.6 million places inside Swiss building zones.
02 NOV
CH
Plot area times AZ is public arithmetic. Our online course turns the Swiss feasibility study into one chain: GIS in, Grasshopper variants, BIM out.
02 NOV
CH
TA-SWISS modelled winter imports to 2070: 12 TWh in 2050 'Offene Märkte' without a reactor, 3.7 TWh in 'Autarkie'. Find your building's winter ratio.
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.
Trinity College Dublin trials a red-mud geopolymer in existing batching kit: 67.8–79.8 % lower carbon than CEM II-A/L, 109.7 % strength after freeze-thaw.
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.
© 2026 PAZ Academy.
