PAZ Kaffi is the AEC newsroom of PAZ Academy Zürich — daily dispatches on architecture, computational design, BIM and AI.
Nvidia's $12.9303B Hugging Face deal puts chips and registry under one owner. Draw your real AI dependency graph — and pin the models your desk relies on.
06 SEP
A Sunday pandas tutorial on the three ways a backtest fools you — lookahead, survivorship, overfitting — and the one-line fix every builder's model needs.
06 SEP
How gradient-free metaheuristics — genetic algorithms, swarm, NSGA-II — grow structural form, why they work, and why the architect still hand-checks the code.
05 SEP
The Olympiastadion's cable roof was form-found, not designed — what equilibrium structures and TNA teach heritage smart buildings about listening to their own loads.
05 SEP
Procore's $845m DroneDeploy buy turns reality capture into a platform layer. The real asset is the scene graph — who owns your site record now?
05 SEP
A 17 m ITER fusion coil cold-shrinks ~50 mm at 4 K and still lands inside a millimetre. Neil Mitchell's retrospective, read as a tolerance lesson for your site.
04 SEP
PAZ Academy's KI Back 2 Work Camp on 23 Sept 2026: scope Archicad automation, tag project data, and put AI to work on your first week back. Bring one real task.
04 SEP
Conway's Game of Life is B3/S23 — eighteen bits of rule. Play the sketch, read the party-wall share, and bring compactness to your massing review.
04 SEP
A browser game hides one missing semicolon in 187,421 lines — and accidentally teaches BIM coordinators why open, greppable IFC beats lossless every time.
"The machine doesn't have taste. We have taste. The machine has a tempo."
03 SEP
An IFC line costs ~31.6 tokens at 2.33 chars/token — 2.2× English. Measure it with tiktoken, and the "AI is bad at numbers" folklore becomes engineering.
03 SEP
IFC (ISO 16739-1:2024) is not just a file format — it is the open, Creative-Commons schema that keeps your building's data yours. A PAZ foundation essay.
03 SEP
A GPS study of 200 million trips finds the longest third of travel carries 42% of income-group mixing — so shortening the city spends encounters.
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.
Nvidia's $12.9303B Hugging Face deal puts chips and registry under one owner. Draw your real AI dependency graph — and pin the models your desk relies on.
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.
