PAZ Kaffi is the AEC newsroom of PAZ Academy Zürich — daily dispatches on architecture, computational design, BIM and AI.
A Qualcomm-powered humanoid fell at Computex 2026. SafeFall research shows how robots land soft, and why architects should design the failure mode first.
16 OCT
Ralph Knowles' solar envelope and Zürich's ABV § 30 shadow rule share one inequality. Carve the hull, test the tower, loft it in Grasshopper + Rhino.
16 OCT
PAZ-RIA runs Rhino and Grasshopper inside Archicad: native beams that update on every run instead of piling up copies. Coming to PAZ-BOX as an add-on.
15 OCT
Printing in orbit and on the Moon flips the load case: the shell shields, a liner holds the air. A foundation essay with a Grasshopper Python check.
15 OCT
A Tesla stock tutorial scores 0.573 ROC-AUC, close to a coin toss. What that teaches architects about Python, scikit-learn and knowing when to stop.
15 OCT
ETH Zurich's Soft Robotics Lab trained an 818 g five-finger hand to walk on its fingertips and then work. What that could mean for shafts and ceiling voids.
14 OCT
CH
In 2022 Switzerland bought 250 MW of gas turbines in Birr as winter insurance. Now they go, PV has doubled to 9.5 GW, and winter stays the open question.
14 OCT
UQ researchers mill mortise-tenon timber joints to 0.25 mm and guide assembly in AR. No screws, nails or glue, so components can be taken apart and reused.
14 OCT
CH
Read the ABZ cooperative tower in Zürich from its 25 m piles to its 1,700 m² roof, and see how load-bearing party walls help keep rents at CHF 19–21/m².
"The machine doesn't have taste. We have taste. The machine has a tempo."
13 OCT
How alkaline, PEM and SOEC electrolysers work, why load range decides the site, and what a Swiss office should ask before drawing a hydrogen hall.
13 OCT
Cao Fei and Small Production turn Kunstmuseum Basel's Gegenwart into a seven-district city with paint, floors, seats and signs. Closes 11 October 2026.
13 OCT
ICD/ITKE Stuttgart load-tested a two-way timber-concrete flat slab on columns: 36 cm deep, grain computed per segment. What it means for Swiss offices.
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.
A Qualcomm-powered humanoid fell at Computex 2026. SafeFall research shows how robots land soft, and why architects should design the failure mode first.
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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