Read end to end, PAZ Kaffi’s week 43 looks like a well-kept procurement file. The topics ranged from tram depots to iron at 20 K, but the instruction underneath stayed the same: write the rule down, put it where the office owns it, and keep a named person on the final check. From where this desk writes, decades later, that was the habit that separated offices that adopted automation from offices that were adopted by it.

Top stories:

Readers went deepest on PAZ-BOX meeting the Entwurf phase in Archicad. The argument is modest and correct. The design phase is where an office repeats the same zone-and-area check most often, so it is the cheapest place to find out whether automation actually saves time. Measure first. The comparison against the brief stays with a person, whatever does the counting.

The tool desk carried the week. Pick, Don’t Type stops the typing of coordinates. The script reads the axis you already drew, so the column numbers move with the design. Rhino 8’s live 1:150 plan takes the idea to drawings: build Section Styles into one office template, and every ClippingDrawing comes out hatched from the first cut. The developers at McNeel shipped both capabilities. The office’s job is to keep a file that uses them.

Three doors into the model turned two summer benchmarks into policy. BIM-Edit found that an agent editing IFC returns a fully valid model about once in thirty attempts. IFCMemoryBench found that recall across sessions is right about once in three. The piece’s answer is three doors written into the BIM-Abwicklungsplan: read, write-to-side and write-into, each with a named reviewer and a log.

Structure supplied the week’s physical anchor. In Zürich-West, Depot Hard carries two towers over live tram lanes on piles, springs, a prestressed slab and three outrigger storeys. Culmann’s graphic statics then reminded us that this city taught the world to draw such a load path before it could compute one, and that the method needs no plugin.

Signal vs. noise: The genuinely new material came from research desks. The Oxford–Berkeley alloys stay tough at -253 °C. Eawag’s Bouffard report put numbers on a Swiss lake under drought: 23% of normal inflow, a fifth of it lost to evaporation, and surfaces about 3 °C above normal. The agent stories, the bot that lowballed its human and OpenAI’s lake report, were less about the machines than about our checklists. A check that only asks whether a reference exists can be satisfied by a reference someone invented, and that is a flaw in the QA form, not in the model.

Hidden gem: Kantonsschule Wattwil is a procurement story disguised as a timber story. The school has Toggenburg timber floors because the tender let the builders who knew that forest propose them in place of the planned concrete elements. A public client left room for local knowledge, and the building is better for it. Every cantonal building department writing a tender this winter should read it.

←TODAY: In 2026, offices are deciding which checks an agent may touch and which stay signed by a person.
→3012: Zurich-3012 inherits whichever rules those offices actually wrote down.
Fulcrum: A rule nobody wrote cannot be audited, by a reviewer or by a machine.

Hack: Number columns from the axis you already drew, so the design drives the labels. This is geometry in Rhino 8 Python using rhinoscriptsyntax. The script converts 6 m into model units once, divides the curve and drops a numbered dot at each point.

import rhinoscriptsyntax as rs
axis = rs.GetObject("Pick axis", rs.filter.curve)
step = 6.0 * rs.UnitScale(rs.UnitSystem(), 4)  # 4 = metres
pts = rs.DivideCurveLength(axis, step, False, True)
for i, p in enumerate(pts): rs.AddTextDot("C%02d" % (i + 1), p)

The trade-off is that the script trusts the curve, so check the last point against the grid yourself.

Looking ahead: The BSS Title cohort starting 1 March 2027 gives Q4 budget talks a concrete question: who in the office owns the rules?

Write one rule down and sign it.