PAZ Kaffi is the AEC newsroom of PAZ Academy Zürich — daily dispatches on architecture, computational design, BIM and AI.
Swissolar's Solarmonitor 2026: 9.5 GW of PV made 2.2 TWh last winter and 93,500 batteries hold 1.4 GWh. What spot-linked feed-in means for your design.
07 NOV
CH
Eight 47 m steel girders, a 10 m cantilever and 372 homes that help fund the hall: HAUS-9 reads Kriens' Pilatus Arena and Tower in one section.
07 NOV
A 65-line Python script turns a Swiss address into terrain height via swisstopo's free API and applies the SIA 261 snow formula, self-checked against a court.
06 NOV
CH
Graphisoft's archicad Python package hit 30.3000 on 7 Oct 2026. Our self-study course maps the interface, Python from zero, and scripts from A to Z.
06 NOV
In 1960 Science dated doomsday to 13 November 2026. Why von Foerster's hyperbola worked, and why every fitted formula in your office needs its data range.
06 NOV
Drag one wall and the integration core jumps a room. Benedikt, Turner and Hillier & Hanson in one playable grid, with a Python hack and a Grasshopper move.
05 NOV
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.
"The machine doesn't have taste. We have taste. The machine has a tempo."
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.
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.
Swissolar's Solarmonitor 2026: 9.5 GW of PV made 2.2 TWh last winter and 93,500 batteries hold 1.4 GWh. What spot-linked feed-in means for your design.
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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