PAZ Kaffi is the AEC newsroom of PAZ Academy Zürich — daily dispatches on architecture, computational design, BIM and AI.
Week 33 recap: Swiss engineers build tools vendors never shipped, Terafab's 1 TW ceiling, Graphisoft's collaboration layer, Betuwe InSAR data, and Rotterdam's green facade debate.
17 AUG
1 Sept 2026: Dr. Mikhael Johanes opens PAZ's BSS Edition XIV with a talk on what an ML model really does when it reads a design brief. Free, open door.
17 AUG
Singapore's biophilic city hits ~50% green cover. Which numbers are transferable physics and which are bought with a governance model no European practice owns.
16 AUG
Degree, control points, knots, weight — the mathematics under every Rhino curve, taught hands-on with the open-source rhino3dm library. Clone it and read the four numbers yourself.
16 AUG
A PAZ foundation essay on piezoelectricity — from the Curies' 1880 discovery to why d33 makes it a superb structural sensor and a poor power harvester.
16 AUG
Pigeon sells deliberate latency; DTN and IFC prove your model was always delayed mail. Read the IfcOwnerHistory postmark before the site trusts the file.
15 AUG
LangGraph turns clash-detection into an auditable state machine. A PAZ Academy hands-on tutorial: build a cyclic clash-check graph, route severity, keep humans in the loop.
15 AUG
Barnabas Calder's Dezeen critique of MVRDV's €240m Shift Embassy, read from the building's side — why a leafy facade is accounting, not decarbonisation.
15 AUG
TouchAnything and the EgoTouch dataset infer contact and force from RGB video alone — what it means for teaching contact-rich site robots in AEC.
"The machine doesn't have taste. We have taste. The machine has a tempo."
14 AUG
CH
Two Pirmin Jung engineers built the Swiss structural software they couldn't buy. A PAZ-Next talk on form-finding timber loads and desk-built façade tools.
14 AUG
How circle and sphere packing — from π/√12 to Kepler and Descartes — turns a generative disc cloud into a defensible, reproducible structural spec.
14 AUG
MINIMIO's 14-byte neural net solves 96.5% of unseen mazes with no memory — and quietly teaches AEC teams when reactive beats heavy tooling.
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.
Week 33 recap: Swiss engineers build tools vendors never shipped, Terafab's 1 TW ceiling, Graphisoft's collaboration layer, Betuwe InSAR data, and Rotterdam's green facade debate.
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.
